The hottest days of summer are numbered, but a good book that can make me feel like I’m in someone else’s muggy, sticky summer (instead of my dry, sticky summer) is still on the menu. Brimstone Hollow, the latest from mystery writer Archer Sullivan, serves that up deliciously.
Memorial Day weekend finds Private Investigator Annie Gore overheating and underpaid, so she needs little convincing to take a case looking into the sudden death of a young woman’s father. The death of Ezra King, apparently from a snakebite, isn’t all that suspicious, given that he was a snake-wrangling preacher for a fringe revivalist Christian congregation, but the fact that he was buried the next day without an autopsy, and before even his estranged daughter was notified, is. So, Annie packs a bag for what will surely be a quick, routine job, and leaves Louisville for Mount Zion, a spit of a town in Eastern Kentucky. There, she finds little help from the gruff-but-fatherly Chief Dishman, but not out of some small-town distrust of this big-city PI. Rather, because the case seems so straightforward: pictures from the scene show the body blackened and swollen from multiple obvious snakebites, and the parsonage showed no sign of forced entry. Still, Annie has a job to do. Even if all is as it seems, she’s got questions to ask.
As she asks those questions of congregants and colleagues, it doesn’t take much to get a whiff of something fishy amidst the sulfur smell that clings to Brimstone Hollow. For starters, the fact that just asking those questions prompted someone to cut her brake lines is a clue to something larger lurking at the church. The murder of the prime suspect of said brake-tampering is another. Annie finds an ally in Chief Dishman as they try to piece together apparently disparate acts of violence, none of which has any obvious ties to Ezra King or his church other than the domino effect they seem to be part of. When an exhumation order reveals that Ezra King’s corpse is missing from its coffin and congregants flock to his grave in anticipation of his resurrection, Annie knows time is running out to put all the pieces together.
It’s not uncommon in the genre for a tough investigator to be grappling with inner demons of one stripe or another. Sullivan, however, weaves Annie’s inner life and the investigation together more skillfully than most. Annie’s past isn’t necessarily what drives her, but what accompanies her as she takes case after case. Even when this case comes a little close to home, taking a case for a daughter in search of an absent and religiously zealous father, her past drives her to little more recklessness than she’d have on a normal day.
There’s a good amount of side-eyeing Ezra King’s snake-handling, not to mention the supposed promise of his re-emergence from the grave, but Sullivan chooses not to dwell on the validity or strangeness of the beliefs held by King or his congregation (or whether those beliefs are held sincerely or conveniently). It’s a wise decision that gives the mystery itself more room to breathe, and the reader more opportunity to be immersed in the town and the clues it holds rather than pondering questions of the divine.
Small-town crime is an appealing topic for many, and one that a good chunk of those probably well-meaning writers get pretty seriously wrong. Of course, mimicking actual policing doesn’t usually make for good policing, but Sullivan threads the needle well here, with a stretched-thin department full of locals that perhaps vary in their acumen but not their commitment to Mount Zion. The regulars they deal with are likewise a colorful crew, though few are depicted as actual villains in this story. Like anyone else, they are loved while they’re around and missed when they’re gone, and it’s a more well-rounded treatment of the usual suspects than is usually seen in this genre.
Annie Gore came out swinging last year in The Witch’s Garden, and she doesn’t miss here in Brimstone Hollow. I have high hopes for future mysteries with this prickly PI.
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