Pray for Silence by Linda Castillo

This is a another Amazon Vine Review I did. I enjoyed this mystery/suspense/thriller and gave it five stars.

This is the second book in the Linda Castillo Amish thriller series called Pray for Silence. I wish I had been able to read the first book prior to reading this one, although this book certainly can stand alone. However, the references to the first book has made me curious about it and I know I would have understood the recurring characters a bit better if I had read it first. Otherwise this book was a very good thriller/suspense novel. The Amish setting made it a bit different even though, in reality with a few adjustments to the story, this could have been the story of any American family that was murdered. The Amish and their pacifism and sense of community seemed to be handled very realistically throughout the book.


An Amish man comes to his neighbors home to help with the morning milking only to discover the husband and two sons are dead in the living room, laying in puddles of blood. When the police arrive, they discover the wife and baby dead of a gunshot wound in the yard and then find the two teenaged daughters in the barn, victims of torture. As this family did not use electricity, the initial investigation is hampered by the lack of lighting and other 'modern' conveniences. At first, the question was had the father murdered the family and then committed suicide or was it murder? As the police chief of the small town starts investigating, things don't add up to what she knows of the Amish for this to have happened. With the discovery of the one girl's diary they finally have some clues to work with and eventually are able to apprehend the killer.

More than just solving a murder, the Chief of Police, Kate Burkholder, is also learning more about herself and her friend and sometimes lover John Tomasetti as they work through their relationship and their own brushes with death and violence in their past. Both are carrying emotional baggage that makes them feel more like real characters than just made up characters for a book.

Pray for Silence is now available for pre-order as it is being published in June 2010.