The Butcher
Back in 1985, Edward Shank became a Seattle legend, the cop who put down the Beacon Hill Butcher and freed the city from a killer's grip. Decades later, he's traded his sprawling Victorian home for a retirement residence where Wednesday macaroni cheese passes for excitement. It's a quiet, ordinary life. Or so it appears. His grandson Matt, an up-and-coming chef with a restaurant, a television deal on the horizon, and genuine reasons to feel good about the future, inherits the old family house with gratitude. Then he finds something buried in the backyard. A crate. A secret so corrosive it could destroy everyone he loves, including his girlfriend Sam, whose mother was murdered when Sam was barely old enough to walk. Sam has spent years trying to make sense of that loss. Now a true crime writer researching the Butcher case, she's long believed her mother was one of his victims, despite the official timeline placing her death two years after the killer was supposedly stopped. It's a nagging inconsistency that nobody else seems troubled by. When fresh murders surface, bearing the same disturbing hallmarks as the original killings, Sam's suspicion hardens into something urgent. The deeper she investigates, the more precarious her position becomes, and the answers, when they finally arrive, turn out to be uncomfortably close. Hillier builds tension with real control here, letting the domestic and the sinister press against each other until the pressure becomes almost unbearable. Booklist called it 'tense, suspenseful, thoroughly creepy', and that feels about right. This is a thriller that rewards patience and then pulls the rug out from under you.
- Author: Jennifer Hillier
- Publisher: Gallery Books
- Genre: True Crime
- ISBN: 978-1476734224
- Pages: 352 pages