Prior to that, she’d been a patrol officer in Columbus, Ohio, for six years and a homicide detective for two. Kate Burkholder has served as Painters Mill Chief of Police for two years. Her lack of sensationalizing or caricaturizing the Amish heightens the terror, yet the traditional, quiet, and persistent ways of the Amish grounded this reader in a comforting way. She writes in her Introduction about how important it is to her to “depict the Amish culture correctly, without bias, and without stereotype.” Castillo’s straightforward use of details regarding Amish life set against the horrific crimes of a serial killer is startling.

Her initial interest has grown into annual research visits.

Although Castillo herself grew up in a small Ohio town, she didn’t know much about the Amish. The story is set in the small fictional town of Painters Mill, Ohio, in the heart of Amish country. As disturbing as the violence against women is in this novel, the complexity and believability of the characters are what made this novel a page-turner for me. I made it through the first four horrific pages of the Prologue to Chapter 1, and I couldn’t put the book down after that. Torn between closing the book because of the horror and continuing to read, my curiosity won out, and I chose the latter.

But at the age of twenty-one, bound and brutalized and lying naked on a concrete floor that was as cold as ice, she believed. She hadn’t believed in monsters since she was six years old, back when her mom would check the closet and look beneath her bed at night. The brutal violence depicted in the Prologue is as shocking to me now as it was then.Ĭastillo hits the reader hard from the first sentences on page one: I may have actually read the first few pages of the book back then because when I recently started reading it, the beginning seemed vaguely familiar. The tantalizing juxtaposition of a serial killer set in a peaceful Amish community is one not many mystery fans can easily pass up. The book caught my eye due to its evocative cover of a stubbly winter field set against an angry dark red sky. In 2009, when Sworn to Silence came out, I was working at a bookstore. “Time flies” and “So many books, so little time” are two clichés that banged up against my reading life when I was offered the opportunity to read and review Linda Castillo’s first Kate Burkholder novel, Sworn to Silence.

Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo is the first book in the Kate Burkholder mystery series set in the small fictional town of Painters Mill, Ohio, in the heart of Amish country.

Linda castillo sworn to silence