Although Sandie Herron has read all of Linda Castillo’s Kate Burkholder mysteries, and I’ve been sharing them with you occasionally, I thought I’d share the most recent book in the series. I don’t have a copy of The Hidden One, and don’t know when I’ll get a chance to read it. It’s better to share the current book with you now. Thank you, Sandie, for your review.

The Hidden One
Written by Linda Castillo
Kate Burkholder series, Book 14
Kindle edition
Minotaur Books (July 5, 2022)
Print length: ‎ 320 pages
ASIN: ‎ B09CNFW7V5

It’s Chief of Police Kate Burkholder’s day off when she is called into her office in Painters Mill, Ohio to meet the Amish church elders from a town near Lancaster, Pennsylvania called Belleville in the Kishacoquillas Valley.  They have a problem they figure Kate can help with.  Two months prior the bones of a former bishop of the church, Ananias Stoltzfus, were dug up by a man plowing his field.  Stoltzfus disappeared 18 years ago, just vanished, leaving two adult children and grandchildren.  Along with the bones, an old muzzleloader was found, one that belonged to Jonas Bowman.  Jonas had been arrested two weeks ago.  That meant that the Amish community had stepped in to help his wife and three kids along with his woodworking business, and that meant the elders felt they could act on his behalf.

Jonas Bowman and Kate Burkholder grew up together in Painters Mill.  Kate was in her mid-teens when the Bowmans moved away.  Kate is astounded that these men have come to her for help, yet she knows she must go.  When confronted with the muzzleloader, Jonas confessed that it was his but denied any involvement in the murder of Ananias.  However, there was bad blood between them since Jonas blamed Ananias for his father’s death.  Jonas’s father, Ezra, was a minister in the Amish church, and there was a disagreement over a diesel tractor he bought.  Ananias would not allow it and silenced Ezra.  Two weeks later, Ezra died from a heart attack that Jonas says was brought on by stress induced by Ananias.  Things got ugly and there was a public disagreement after church services. 

Kate knows Jonas as a good, hard-working man, honest to the core, and she cannot believe he would commit murder.  She leaves her small police force in Painters Mill and goes to Belleville.  First she helps get Jonas released from jail on bail.  With so little to go on, she decides to get to know the victim, and like the layers of an onion, the layers begin to peel away.  Kate’s journey is not easy, and she awakens in her motel to be beaten and her vehicle ransacked.  Yet she continues to talk with those who knew Ananias and his wife only to be threatened again and again.  Perseverance is her middle name, and Kate pushed onward until an odd clue falls into her lap that lifts the veil covering everything up.

While I missed contact with Kate’s hometown police force, we got to know someone from Kate’s past who was important to her in a new way.  There were several flashbacks to times from her childhood where she reminisced about Jonas and what might have been that slowed this reader’s heartrate back to normal from the tension of tracking the killer.  While I always expect a twist at the end of Castillo’s books, this one felt like it came from the cornfields until I thought about the clues leading up to it and how they made sense.  While Kate wasn’t trying to solve the murder of Ananias Stoltzfus, she needed to in order to prove Jonas innocent.  Lucky for us, that cold case heated up nicely.