Priest is the chief of police and there is a serial killer in town ( )

I was really intrigued by the premise of this novel. I love books that revolve around serial killers and I thought the fact the investigator was a priest and a sheriff would be a really unique twist on a serial killer novel. The atmosphere of this book is really relaxed and small-town, and I liked how we got to know the characters in this town really well. However, I felt like a lot of them were extremely one dimensional. I also never fully connected with Solomon though I liked him as a character.

My biggest problem with this novel were the relationships. Some of them felt extremely rushed, and some were extremely superficial. There were a lot of strange choices made in this book, and while overall it's a solid mystery novel, it just left me feeling like there should have been more and I was never fully invested in it.
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Well, this was a surprise. The beginning was just meh, but the story picked up quite nicely soon after. Solomon Lancaster is a Catholic priest and a sheriff in a small town in Indiana in the early 1980's. Bodies start piling up adorned with flowers. People start panicking and FBI storms in to take over the investigation. I figured out the first big twist beforehand. I have read my Agatha Christie after all. But the second twist came out of nowhere. I liked how the author described the rural life and people of Indiana. ( )

I'm not sure if the story is based on true events or if its fiction just built around a real town.... The town is very real. The story is set in the 1980s in the small town of Crooked Creek, Indiana, Jeremy Scott’s novel opens with a murder. This might not seem like the most original of beginnings, but Scott cleverly constructs the opening to transform quickly into something much larger, and something quite sinister. The murder victim is 84-year-old Tina Hillary, and the stem of a white lily is sewn into her arm. The more you read, the more twisted and terrifying it becomes. Soon the little town has one murder after another, all with attached flowers. The town was unprepared to say the least... the police department only had five people on the payroll, but they all appeared nightly as they received nightly national attention for having a serial killer who’s preying on the locals. The novel is told mainly from the perspective of Father Solomon Lancaster, who serves the dual roles of both the sheriff of Crooked Creek and the priest at Jerusalem Independent Catholic Church. It's a unique point of view allowing the book to showcase the narrator’s deep complexities: “I began to worry that sooner or later, my obligations as a priest would be undone or superseded by my obligations as a sheriff. It was a conflict of interest I had always hoped to avoid. Foolish.” Throughout the book, you see and feel all that Father Lancaster is experiencing as it all unfolds through each chapter. If you like psychological thrillers, you will more than likely enjoy this book but be aware that some of it is extremely graphic. ( )

Oof, this Early Reviewers book was a total miss for me. The narrator is both the town sheriff and the local Catholic priest, and he's in way over his head when a serial killer appears to set up shop in his rural Indiana town.

The book is pegged on its cover as "A Thriller," which can only have been an aspirational appellation added by someone who had not actually read the book. Often legitimate thrillers will effectively employ humor at strategic points to diffuse the building tension, but here we have Sheriff Father Lancaster making fun of everyone and everything around him, without any tension in sight to be diffused. It just comes off as mean-spirited and annoying.

He is at least an equal-opportunity asshole, I'll give him that. Everyone from the local farmers, to the police officers on loan from neighboring departments to the mayor and the FBI come in for ridicule. To read Scott's rendition of rural Indiana is to wonder why anyone would ever want to live there. In the narrator's eagerness to spotlight the worst aspects and congenital quirks of what he clearly views as Hicksville USA, he spends most of an entire chapter explaining at laborious length what a tenderloin sandwich is, making fun of the people who eat it, and then admitting that it's tasty. Pick a lane, Sheriff Father Lancaster!

The only thing worse than the characterization is the plotting. None of it hangs together and there were so many unanswered questions, random red herrings that never get resolved, and unexpected revelations that don't jibe with anything that came earlier that I wondered if the book was a strange choose-your-own-adventure gone awry.

I'm already as bored writing this review as I was reading the book, so I'll wrap this up. There are couple of twists that I'm sure someone in the marketing department thought justified that "Thriller" label, but they came too late to redeem the book for me. I sincerely hope you never read this one, but if you have, there is just one of those unanswered questions that I'd love to have answered about the murderer and his crimes:

WHERE DID HE GET THE HORSE?!?!?!? ( )