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Detective Brandon Berger is devoted to his job —maybe a little too much. When a concerned mother asks for his help tracking down her estranged daughter who she fears is being ill-treated by her controlling husband, Brandon absent-mindedly blows off his anniversary plans with his long suffering wife, Debbie. But the pull of the case is indeed strong, as the estranged daughter's husband is the junior pastor of Magnolia Faith Church, where the church's charismatic pastors inspire superhuman faith and devotion in the parishioners, despite its mysterious inner-workings.
We also meet William Chandler, a young father, who is taking his wife, Claire, and infant Gracie for a camping trip in northern Louisiana's Skybald National Forest. This is not just any family excursion for William; as a boy, he saw his father die tragically at Skybald, so this trip carries the promise of catharsis. Soon after arriving, the Chandlers meet a bizarre and paranoid ex-soldier who disturbs them and turns their idyllic trip into a nightmare. A series of events, due to both nature and the creepy soldier, causes the family to attempt to escape. But William unaccountably wakes up in a hospital room and finds himself under arrest for the murder of his infant child. Claire has reached a deal with prosecutors to testify against him.
A few months later, Brandon and his partner Dawn start investigating the death of a young woman who was connected to the Magnolia Faith Church. When an eyewitness claims he saw the lead pastor of the church leaving the crime scene, Brandon's investigation collides head-on with the powerful and perhaps dangerous church.
HOLLOW CRIB alternates between these two storylines throughout, and for most of its length, leaves the reader guessing about how they will be tied together. Rather than a gradual tangling of the two threads, first-time author Bourg (himself a retired policeman) explosively combines the storylines in the last fifty or so pages. The fact that the usual arc of these books is reversed is a bit refreshing on the face of it, but the way its executed more has the feel of a rushed ending than subverting the usual genre archetype.
A refreshing quality of HOLLOW CRIB is the decision to set it not in New Orleans as so many authors are apt to do, but in a small community on the outskirts of The Big Easy. Southern Gothic works best when the reader views these locales in greater depth than the usual tourist overview, and the small town atmosphere feels authentic throughout.
But in the end, HOLLOW CRIB is a fairly flawed work. The scenes of Brandon's home life are really excellent and the case he embarks on has plenty of potential, but the inclusion of a second, much weaker narrative strand blunts the effect of the book with the obligatory collision of the two sets of characters. There is potential here, and one hopes the next Magnolia Parish Mystery capitalizes on it, but it's hard to recommend this one except maybe to hardcore fans of gothic Southern mysteries.
§ Ben Neal is a librarian who likes to fancy himself an amateur writer, humorist, detective, and coffee connoisseur in his spare time. He can be reached at beneneal@indiana.edu.
Reviewed by Ben Neal, March 2016
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