The Witch's Orchard by Archer Sullivan Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Pages: 320
Published by Minotaur Books on August 12, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
A ninth generation Appalachian herself, Archer Sullivan brings the mountains of North Carolina to life in The Witch’s Orchard, a wonderfully atmospheric novel that introduces private investigator Annie Gore.
Former Air Force Special Investigator Annie Gore joined the military right after high school to escape the fraught homelife of her childhood. Now, she’s getting by as a private investigator and her latest case takes her to an Appalachian holler not unlike the one where she grew up.
Ten years ago, three little girls went missing from their tiny mountain town. While one was returned, the others were never seen again. After all this time without answers, the brother of one of the girls wants to hire an outsider, and he wants Annie. While she may not be from his town, she gets mountain towns. Mountain people. Driving back into the hills for a case this old—it might be a fool’s errand. But Annie needs to put money in the bank and she can’t turn down a case. Not even one that dredges up her own painful past.
In the shadow of the Blue Ridge, Annie begins to track the truth, navigating a decade’s worth of secrets, folklore of witches and crows, and a whole town that prefers to forget. But while the case may have been buried, echoes of the past linger. And Annie’s arrival stirs someone into action.
My Review:
Annie Gore has been a lot of things in her life, a private investigator, an Air Force special operations investigator, a muscle car mechanic, a poverty draftee into the military – and a child of the Appalachian hollers who is still running from a past she can’t forget.
Max Andrews needs all of those things, but it’s the last who pushes Annie to return to a place much too much like the one she fled, investigating people who could all too easily have been her own neighbors, just like the ones who looked on and kept to themselves as her dad regularly beat on her mother. Leaving young Annie to pick up the literal pieces of a woman who saw no way out – or didn’t look hard enough for one.
Max is just barely an adult, but he’s a young man with a mission that Annie is all too able to help him with – but all too unwilling into the bargain.
Ten years ago, the tiny town of Quartz Creek became briefly famous when three little girls disappeared – never to be found. The final girl was Max’ then six-year-old sister, Molly. His family fractured in the aftermath, his mother committed suicide, his father became a long-haul trucker to get away from his memories, and Max was left feeling responsible for a tragedy his then eight-year-old self could never have prevented.
He’s been saving money for ten years to hire Annie – or someone like her – so he can FINALLY get answers to his questions. Even if those answers are terrible. He needs closure more than he needs a happy ending he no longer has a hope of getting.
Annie just needs a job. She has too many bills to pay and nothing else on the horizon. Quartz Creek is the last place she wants to go because she knows how this case is going to go. Not just that she doesn’t expect to find Molly, alive OR dead, but that she does expect the town to bring back all of her bad memories and for her to bring back all of theirs in responses that will be hostile at best and violent at worst.
But she sees too much of Max in herself to resist his plea. She sees too much of herself in entirely too many of the women in Quartz Creek to remain uninvolved. And with her fresh eyes and lack of preconceived notions about the town and the people in it, she sees a truth that no one EVER wanted to see.
Escape Rating A+: The Witch’s Orchard is perched right on the edge of that seat between mystery and thriller, with the reader sitting on their hands through every twist and turn in a vain attempt not to bite their nails at the ever rising tension and outright compulsion of the story.
I couldn’t put this one down, I couldn’t turn my eyes away, and I can’t stop thinking about it. My reading group said this one was good – but I wasn’t expecting it to be THIS good.
It also reminded me a lot of Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad series and Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott series, which have similar settings and similar protagonists and/or secondary characters. I wasn’t expecting both The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter and the Bootlegger’s Daughter to be looking over my shoulder as I read, but they were and it’s honestly kind of awesome. There’s also a bit of the much more recent Spider to the Fly in the setting, the protagonist AND the identity of the victims, even though that is considerably bloodier and more clearly into thriller territory.
I digress a bit because otherwise I’d just be squeeing all over the place. This was just SO GOOD.
The mystery itself is absolutely fascinating – and it’s made even better by the flawed, broken character of its protagonist, Annie Gore. She’s doing a terrible job to the best of her ability, and she knows it. She knows no one is going to be happy with her, but there’s at least a possibility that this will finally be done. Which means she’s caught up in guilt and remorse when her efforts make the situation worse all around – even though that’s exactly what she expected when she began.
A part of this one that was kind of icing on the cake was the way that folklore and storytelling influenced the case, the original investigation, the intervening decade, AND Annie’s path to the truth. There’s an old story about “The Witch of Quartz Creek” that Annie hears over and over. But each telling is just a bit different, depending on the perspectives and situation of the person telling it. Inside each version is a kernel of the truth, so it’s in the repeated similar but not the same variations that finally leads Annie to the long-hidden truth. (That part reminded me a bit of The River Has Roots even as the contemporary avatar for the witch – or at least the person everyone believed was the witch – recalled Nora Bonesteel from Ballad. I’m digressing again.)
Obviously, I adored The Witch’s Orchard. I’m not alone in that adoration, as this book is among the contenders for this year’s Goodreads Choice Awards for Best DEBUT Novel. I’m only surprised it’s not a contender for Best Mystery/Thriller because it should be. Whether it wins this award or any other, it will certainly be on my list of the Best Books of 2025 AND Annie Gore’s next adventure, Brimstone Hollow, is already on the list of my most Anticipated Reads for 2026!
