Sworn to Silence

The novel is set in Painters Mill, a small fictional town in Ohio's Amish Country. The Amish are a conservative religious community that travels by horse and buggy, speaks a German dialect called Pennsylvania Dutch, and strives to live apart from mainstream American society.

The story opens with an unnamed young woman enduring torture at the hands of an unknown captor. He rapes her, shocks her with an electrical device, and carves into her flesh. He chains her ankles, hoists her upside down, and slits her throat.

Kate Burkholder, the 30-year-old chief of police in Painters Mill, is woken early on a January morning when Officer T.J. Banks discovers a young woman's nude body in a snowy field. Kate's department is small, consisting of three full-time officers, two dispatchers, and one auxiliary officer. Dr. Ludwig Coblentz, the acting county coroner, estimates the time of death between four and seven P.M. the previous day. The victim's throat has been cut, her wrists bear deep ligature marks from wire bindings, and she has been sexually assaulted. Most disturbing is a carving on her abdomen: the Roman numeral XXIII.

Kate and Doc Coblentz immediately recognize its significance. Sixteen years earlier, a serial killer dubbed "the Slaughterhouse Killer" murdered four women in Painters Mill using the same method: exsanguination, the bleeding-out process used in livestock slaughter. Each victim had a successive Roman numeral carved into her abdomen. The case was never solved. Kate harbors a devastating secret: She knows the killer from 16 years ago cannot be responsible, because she killed him.

Through flashbacks and internal narration, Kate reveals that at 14, she was raped in her family's kitchen by Daniel Lapp, an 18-year-old Amish man who worked for her father. She shot him with her father's shotgun. Rather than call the police, her father declared it "an Amish matter" and, with Kate's brother Jacob, buried the body at an abandoned grain elevator in the next county. The family was sworn to silence. Kate later left the community and was placed under the bann, a form of excommunication, for not joining the church after her rumspringa, the Amish coming-of-age period before baptism. She became a patrol officer and then a homicide detective in Columbus before returning to Painters Mill as chief two years ago.

Kate identifies the victim as Amanda Horner, a 21-year-old whose mother reports her missing. The autopsy confirms the killer used a modified stun gun, bound Amanda with wire, hung her by chains, and wore a lubricated condom, leaving no DNA. Doc Coblentz notes the Roman numeral jumps from IX to XXIII, suggesting as many as 13 unknown victims in between. This plants a seed of doubt in Kate about whether Lapp truly died.

She visits Jacob at the family farm and asks him to help her find Lapp's remains. Jacob reluctantly agrees, but their nighttime search of the grain elevator yields nothing. During the excavation, Jacob reveals he once saw teenage Kate smile at Lapp, implying she invited the attack. The accusation devastates her.

Meanwhile, Agent John Tomasetti of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI), Ohio's state law enforcement agency, is assigned to the case. Tomasetti is a former Cleveland narcotics detective whose wife and two young daughters were murdered by a drug lord two years earlier. Haunted by grief and struggling with addiction to prescription drugs and alcohol, he is on the verge of being forced out of BCI; his superiors assign him the Painters Mill case to push him toward resignation.

A second body is discovered at an abandoned farmhouse: a woman dead approximately two to three weeks, hanging upside down from a ceiling beam with her throat cut. The Roman numeral XXII is carved into her abdomen. Kate identifies her as Ellen Augspurger, an Amish woman reported missing by her parents. Kate requests help from the Holmes County Sheriff's Office, and Sheriff Nathan Detrick joins the investigation.

Kate privately asks Officer Glock to investigate Daniel Lapp without explaining why. Her sister Sarah, pregnant and nearing her due date, comes to the station to report that someone has left large footprints near her barn. Sarah fears Lapp may be alive. She later confesses she sent an anonymous note to an Amish bishop stating that Kate knows the killer's identity. The note reaches the mayor, who asks Tomasetti to quietly investigate Kate.

A third victim, Brenda Johnston, the 20-year-old daughter of town councilman Norm Johnston, is found eviscerated at Miller's Pond. The killing represents a massive escalation. Norm confronts Kate at the station and blames her for his daughter's death.

Kate returns to the grain elevator alone. Recalling her father's words about putting Lapp "in the hole," she locates the boot pit, a deep grain-receiving shaft beneath the elevator floor, and discovers a skull, ribs, and teeth. Daniel Lapp is definitively dead. Tomasetti, who followed her, descends into the pit and finds the bones. Cornered, Kate confesses everything: the rape, the shooting, the burial, and her belief that Lapp was the Slaughterhouse Killer. She delayed calling for outside help because she feared investigators would uncover the body and her crime. Tomasetti does not judge her but warns that the secret could compromise the case.

The town council fires Kate, citing her delay in requesting assistance. Detrick becomes acting chief. From home, Kate continues working the case and discovers a newspaper article about three similar murders along the Tanana River in Alaska, where a hunting guide named Nate Detrick found one of the bodies. Further research reveals Detrick lived in every location where similar murders occurred over a span of 25 years. He owns a blue Yamaha snowmobile matching witness descriptions and fits Tomasetti's criminal profile precisely.

Detrick, meanwhile, has arrested Jonas Hershberger, a reclusive Amish pig farmer, planting blood evidence and other items at Jonas's farm. Kate is certain Jonas is innocent. When she visits the station, Jonas tells her Detrick attacked him and choked him with shoestrings, staging the incident to look like a suicide attempt. Detrick catches Kate there, handcuffs her, and throws her out.

Kate calls Tomasetti with her evidence, and he agrees to drive through a blizzard to Painters Mill. Before he arrives, Detrick pulls Kate over in a staged traffic stop, incapacitates her with a stun gun, and drives her to an abandoned farmhouse. He reveals he learned of her investigation after an Indiana detective's return call was mistakenly transferred to him. He confesses to the murders, admitting he has killed since childhood. He begins to assault Kate, but she fights back, kicking him into a kerosene heater and starting a fire. He overpowers her with the stun gun and chokes her unconscious.

Tomasetti searches abandoned properties with Kate's officers. He breaks into Detrick's home and finds souvenirs taken from victims, confirming Detrick is the killer. Spotting a faint glow through the storm, he finds the farmhouse, enters through the back door, and shoots Detrick twice. Kate is badly beaten but alive; the assault was not completed.

In the aftermath, Detrick survives and confesses to as many as 30 murders. Jonas Hershberger is exonerated, and Kate is reinstated as chief. During her recovery, Tomasetti reveals his own past: After his family's murder, he kidnapped the drug lord responsible, extracted a taped confession, and burned him alive, then framed the man's partner. Kate and Tomasetti spend the night together before he returns to Columbus. The novel closes with Tomasetti calling to say he is driving back, and Kate agrees to have lunch, the story ending on a note of cautious hope.