Beyond the issues in the settlement, Kate suspects Schrock is engaged in some kind of cross-border smuggling between New York and Canada. Kate learns that Schrock has taken to “counseling” young girls during their Rumspringa to prepare them for their wifely obligations. Professions of loyalty to the bishop are woven with tales of violent punishments at his hand: bitter cold enclosures in a chicken coop, severed fingers, the list goes on. Bishop Schrock-at once revered and feared-is at the root. All the local Amish women had gathered, helping the new mother with her chores.”īut the settlement is not quite the neighborly fellowship of Kate’s youth. She thinks, “One sip and a hundred memories rush through me… a neighbor’s farm.a new baby. Having sweet coffee with her new friends stirs nostalgia in Kate. Kate joins a circle of Amish women in a quilting group at The Calico Country Store. Posing as a widow, Kate moves into a flimsy trailer near the settlement in the dead of winter. They enlist Chief Burkholder for an undercover assignment.įamiliar with the lifestyle and fluent in Pennsylvania Dutch, Kate is equipped to straddle the worlds of the “plain people” and English. Neither the state nor local police can crack the wall of silence around Rachel’s death.

Rumors fly about Bishop Eli Schrock, the ultra-conservative leader. The novel opens with a teenage Amish girl named Rachel Esh found frozen to death in the woods east of Malone, NY-apparently after an attempt to escape from her community. Kate Burkholder is the Chief-of-Police in a small Ohio county she also happens to be ex- Amish. In Among the Wicked, Linda Castillo transports readers to the interior of these buggies and the lives of their occupants. Though we often see their buggies, the Amish community can seem mysterious-even impenetrable-to the non-Amish or English.

The daylight hours in the North Country are punctuated by the rhythmic clop of horses’ hooves on pavement. Cover Detail: Among the Wicked, a Kate Burkholder Novel, Linda Castillo, St.

Among the wicked by linda castillo