First of all, thank you to St Martin’s Press | Minotaur Books for sending me an ebook ARC of The Witch’s Orchard, in exchange for my honest review.
If you don’t read a lot of thrillers but would like a bit of a creepy stalk through the mountain forests and look for missing children 10 years after their disappearance, fed history and folklore about Appalachia along the way, then you will want to pick up The Witch’s Orchard. If you’re a seasoned thriller reader you will probably figure it out quite quickly, but enjoy being proved right.
Alright, let’s dive in…
Annie isn’t like other girls. You will know that because she wears combat boots, she doesn’t do her laundry, she doesn’t seem to care for her appearance, drives an old and obscure car, and she’s rough and kind of a bit off putting. I had a really hard time getting into this book because the “she’s not like other women” details was just a BIT much for the first few chapters of the book. Her obsession with her car also grated on my nerves – we get it. It’s an old car and you love it. I know that this book is a lead up to a series of Annie’s private investigation life, but it was definitely a bit too much character driven in the beginning. (The amount of page space dedicated to Leo when he genuinely serves no purpose to the plot other than to eventually explain to us about more trauma our extremely traumatised main character has. I honestly did google Archer Sullivan at one point because it felt like a man writing a woman at some points (she’s tiny but she can take down a full grown man. She’s petite but eats 2 boxes of pizza to herself and never gains a pound blah blah blah)
At about 25% when I was ready to just DNF this book, the plot finally picked up and I got invested in the storyline. It was an easy unravelling if you look for clues and listen to what is said about our “suspects” – the ending was a fun little twist about who the actual culprit turned out to be…
Will I read more about Annie the PI’s misadventures? Probably not. However, this a debut for the author and I think they have a lot of potential as a writer and will see a fair bit of commercial success with this series. (Let’s be super honest and say there are some absolutely terrible debuts out there that I have read that have been adored by readers – every book has it’s audience!)
******************SPOILER WARNING*************
We are supposed to believe that this young woman who has been Flowers in the Attic’d for a decade figured out how to log into a computer (that was password protected mind you), navigate the internet, teach herself how to drive a car, shoot a gun, etc but with no hands on experience and then pull off what she did? I really just felt like we got to the last few chapters of the book, realised that the word count was met and slammed an ending into it.
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