Thank you Brilliance Audio for the ALC and Jennifer Musico, PR / Thomas Mercer #partner, for the finished copy of The Amish Wife in exchange for my honest review.
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer / Brilliance Audio
Published: January 1, 2024
Summary:
The #1 New York Times and Amazon Charts bestselling author Gregg Olsen solves a murder among the Amish and reveals the conspiracy to keep it a secret in a heartbreaking and horrifying true-crime story.
In 1977, in an Ohio Amish community, pregnant wife and mother Ida Stutzman perished during a barn fire. The coroner’s natural causes. Ida’s husband, Eli, was never considered a suspect. But when he eventually rejected the faith and took his son, Danny, with him, murder followed.
What really happened to Ida? The dubious circumstances of the tragic blaze were willfully ignored and Eli’s shifting narratives disregarded. Could Eli’s subsequent cross-country journey of death—including that of his own son—have been prevented if just one person came forward with what they knew about the real Eli Stutzman?
The questions haunted Gregg Olsen and Ida’s brother Daniel Gingerich for decades. At Daniel’s urging, Olsen now returns to Amish Country and to Eli’s crimes first exposed in Olsen’s Abandoned Prayers, one of which has remained a mystery until now. With the help of aging witnesses and shocking long-buried letters, Olsen finally uncovers the disturbing truth—about Ida’s murder and the conspiracy of silence and secrets that kept it hidden for forty-five years.
My thoughts:
This is the first book I’ve read by Gregg Olsen, though I do have a couple of his other books sitting on his shelf. I love true crime and I was excited to be approached about this one, however I do wish I was told that this is a follow-up to one of his previous books, Abandoned Prayers as I would have loved to have read that one first, but now I’m quite eager to read that one.
It is quite clear that Gregg Olsen is one dogged investigator, determined to get to the bottom of something he is interested in. I did feel in this one, though, there is a lot of personal ties to it, and as this is my first time reading this author, I don’t know if all his books are like this.
The case itself was quite fascinating and one I was not at all familiar with, so that kept me quite engaged in the story. I know a little about the Amish culture but seeing it from this vantage point was something else.
I definitely plan on reading more from this author as I think there is definitely something intriguing in his writing.
Audio thoughts:
I was able to get my hands on the audio of this book and I have to say I was a little underwhelmed with the narrator. James Daniel Burkdoll read in a rather monotone voice the whole way and while I understand this is a nonfiction book, I think a little inflection would have gone a long way.
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