Marianne’s Pick of the Week: The Witch’s Orchard by Archer Sullivan

Private Investigator, Annie Sullivan is one tough nut. A former Air Force investigator and ninth generation Appalachian, Annie returns to the mountains to investigate the cold case of three missing girls in Archer Sullivan’s new novel,  The Witch’s Orchard.  

Annie Sullivan is barely making ends meet. She has pawned her prized watch and is down to her last three hundred dollars. Max Andrews, an 18-year-old from Quartz Creek, North Carolina comes to her with the case of his long missing little sister. Molly is one of the three young girls who vanished ten years ago. The only clues in the case are the applehead dolls left in each child’s place. Annie, desperate for the $800 per day Max can pay, agrees to investigate for one week.

She heads back to the Appalachia (the land of her childhood). Quartz Creek is exactly like the town where Annie grew up. It is full of small-town secrets and grudges, under employed citizens, and a meth lab in the long-shuttered doll factory.

When Annie arrives, she meets Susan McKinney, a local who makes potions and reads cards. Some townsfolk assume Susan, who they believe to be the Quartz Creek witch, took the missing girls. The witch is a character in a folk tale who traded apples to the starving mother of two girls and then turned them into birds.

Annie knows that to find Molly she must find the other girls as well. Her poking around does not earn Annie any friends with local law enforcement or the townsfolk. She keeps getting herself into one situation after another; turns up multiple suspects and faces down her own difficult upbringing.

This is a story steeped in Appalachian lore and setting. I felt the cold rains and dark woods. Multiple characters retell the tale of the Quartz Creek witch; all with a slightly different spin. Sullivan keeps readers guessing who is behind the disappearance until the very end. Pick up this one if you like your mystery with a side an Appalachia. Readers of Charles Frazier’s Nightwoods or The Round House by Louise Erdrich will want to check this one out.