Grade A #AudioBookReview: Believer by Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare

Believer: A Prairie Nightingale Mystery by Ruthie Knox, Annie Mare
Narrator: Mia Hutchinson-Shaw
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: Prairie Nightingale #3
Pages: 302
Length: 9 hours and 36 minutes
Published by 7th Floor Books, Brilliance Audio on September 8, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

A teenager convinced there’s more to a cousin’s estrangement than family friction leads to the exposure of a cult operating in plain sight.

Prairie Nightingale, PI, has it great kids, a private detective agency run by brilliant women, and maybe a handsome FBI situationship. When her daughter’s best friend asks her to look into a bitter family estrangement, Prairie is reluctant to take on a case that requires even more life/work balance than she’s already attempting—especially with her parents visiting from out of town. But when everyone she talks to takes her deeper into a labyrinth of lies, control, and secrets, she and her team begin to untangle the history of a couple with a knack for gathering fervent followers … and collecting criminal charges.

The existence of a cult is difficult to prove, and this one’s members are less than forthcoming, requiring Prairie and her fellow agents to deploy all of their available tricks and talents. Joyce is uncovering shady history and false identities, Emma’s partnered with ex-members to appeal to her podcast audience, and Prairie and Foster find themselves following the money and working undercover. Even Prairie’s parents chip as residents of an Oregon commune, they know the ins and outs of high-control groups. And, to Prairie’s horror, her daughters sneak in a spy mission of their own.

But a cult is most dangerous when it’s threatened, and Prairie’s desire to rescue believers makes her a target—and risks exposing cult members on the run. She’ll need more faith in her abilities than she’s ever had to find the truth.

My Review:

I didn’t so much pick this one up as reach out to the authors so I could make grabby hands at it. And I’m ever so grateful they obliged with both the book AND the audiobook.

I fell hard for Prairie Nightingale’s compulsive nosiness and pattern disruption genius in the very first book, Homemaker, and was even more enthralled with her case in Trailbreaker. Part of what I loved about both books was the way that Prairie and her team were able to see both connections and especially disconnections in the evidence – AND in the places where there was a lack of evidence – because they were looking at entirely different things than any previous investigator had looked at. And because they didn’t go into the case with the same assumptions and preconceptions that more traditional investigators had brought to the case.

And it’s a huge part of the charm of the series, at least for this reader. It’s about the way that the world works differently for men than it does for women. Not necessarily ‘better’, although sometimes that’s true. Not necessarily ‘worse’ either. But different in the myriad ways that society conditions all of us. For example, I’d bet that very few men are taught that it’s necessary to weave their keys between their fingers when walking to their cars in a dark parking area.

This third case is even more twisted – and has just as long a reach – as their previous case in Trailbreaker. It all begins with Prairie’s daughter Anabel’s best friend Kai. Kai’s cousin Brittany is missing – and has been for years. Brittany was an adult when she booted her parents out of her life, so the police say there’s nothing they can do. Estrangements between parents and adult children happen every day.

All of which is true, but, that doesn’t mean that Prairie Hawk Investigations can’t do their best to at least locate Brittany Straubel and do the equivalent of a “wellness check”. Because the whole story of Brittany’s disappearance – along with her very recent sighting WITH A BABY – in Green Bay, makes Prairie’s investigative senses tingle.

But the more the agency looks into the case, the dicier the whole situation sounds. It’s not just about Brittany. It’s not just one family estrangement. It’s a love bombing coffeeshop and a creative cooperative that gets pressured to provide goods to said coffeeshop but doesn’t get paid for its products. It’s a church with a scuzzy pastor and a secretive mission statement. It’s a singing camp for adults where the attendees are overpromised and underdelivered to – and then not permitted to leave when they complain.

The further back – and further west – that Prairie Hawk Investigations traces the chain of estrangements, coffeeshops closing in the middle of the night, song camps where there’s no escape, pyramid schemes and survivors still dealing with the wreck of their lives, the more that The Mill Coffeeshop and the Verse Church that sponsors it looks like exactly what it is. A cult.

A cult that Brittany Straubel, along with an ever-increasing number of other young women, may have entered willingly, but may not be able to get out of without a Prairie Hawk shaped extraction. Or distraction. Or both.

It’s up to Prairie Hawk Investigations to decide whether or not they’re willing to take on the many-tentacled monster that any cult represents.

Of course they are. Even when they get in WAY over their heads. Because of course they do.

Escape Rating A: I shouldn’t have loved this so hard, but that’s true of the entire series. There’s so much of Prairie’s life that would drive me to distraction in real life – stuff that usually turns me right off even in fiction. And yet…I’m completely hooked.

Hooked, and so invested in finding out – not so much whodunnit because this isn’t that kind of a mystery – but rather finding out whether or not they can bring the cult down and rescue everyone willing to be rescued – a whole lot faster than the truly excellent audio by Mia Hutchinson Shaw would allow. I intended to take a week to savor the story in audio, because she’s very, very good at embodying Prairie, but I couldn’t stand the wait and finished in text instead. Because patience may be a virtue but it’s not one of mine, and reading is FASTER.

One of the fun – if occasionally crazy-making – parts of this series so far is the way that Prairie’s domestic life and domestic crises aren’t just a “B plot” but are threaded into the story. Prairie Hawk Investigations is literally a family affair that includes Prairie’s ex-husband, her two teenage daughters, her ex-mother-in-law (who is also one of her business partners!), and, increasingly, Prairie’s very own FBI agent, Foster Rosemare, with whom she is in the opening stages of what she calls a “situationship” because both of them are equally hesitant about getting deeper into the relationship they’re already having.

(I personally wish they’d get on with it already. Or that Prairie was a bit more explicit – even if only inside the confines of her own head – about why she’s as hesitant as she is. I mean, I get it in general terms as they both have some serious emotional baggage, but the way they keep avoiding sex is starting to feel contrived. Your reading mileage may vary.)

The way this case works, and the way Prairie thinks about what’s happening in the present, how so many young women got caught up in it in the past, and why it’s so difficult for so many people to extract themselves from such a comprehensive, all-inclusive trap, was self-reflective in a way that told us a lot about Prairie, how she got to be who she is, who she is as a mother and her fears for her daughters, and about her relationship with her parents and her own past.

So many of the girls caught up by the cult were seventeen, on the cusp of legal adulthood. Prairie was seventeen when she left her parents’ commune and set out to discover who she wanted to be. Her older daughter Anabel and Anabel’s friend Kai are seventeen now and on the cusp of their own lives’ adventures. How Prairie reflected on that coincidental timing, how much she thought she knew at seventeen and how little she actually did, and yet what a difference it made in her life that she always knew she could go back, and her hopes for her daughters’ futures and fears for their safety that she is well aware she can’t use as an excuse to clip their wings, play in the background of the story like a song that the reader can’t get out of their head when the story is over.

So I was thrilled to discover a sneak peek at Prairie Hawk Investigations’ next case, Warrior, at the back of this story. It’s definitely something I’m looking forward to, late next spring.

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