The Night Flowers was very interesting as it changed from multiple POVs, including someone who living between the living and the dead. I really enjoyed the fact that this was a paranormal mystery story with strong female protagonists. If you are a fan of true crime, then I would definitely recommend this!

I am a sucker for thrillers about librarians, and this one did not disappoint. Rich character work and compelling mystery storytelling combine here to lovely affect.

I really wanted to get to this one, as it seemed interesting. The downfall was that I requested so many ARCs that I could not get to all of them before the book was archived. If I can find this somewhere for a reasonable price, I will try to get it!

Really liked this book! Great debut from Sara Herchenroether and will look forward to more books from this author. I hope the author puts these two characters in a series of books. I would like to see how these characters grow and work together to solve more cold cases. I listened to this on audio and the narrators did a great job. Thank you NetGalley for this ARC.

Set in the early aughts, this is the story of three people found in New Mexico's Gila forest. A young woman and two children. Flash forward three decades, and a librarian battling breast cancer (very real details provided that give some startling insight into this courageous battle) and a weary detective pair up to find the truth of what happened so long ago. Very well written. I look forward to the author's next entry.

This was a really interesting concept and I enjoyed the uniqueness! You don’t often find that with thrillers these days so big kudos to the author!

This book wasn’t for me. I found it predictable, and that left me wanting to skim. The writing wasn’t bad, it’s just not for me. Not to say it’s not for you, so if interested in the blurb, you should give it a shot!

Thanks to NetGalley & the publisher for the ARC!

Colleen Chi-Girl 4**** Review
GR bookshelves: 2023, crime-mysteries, netgalley, women-centered, new-mexico, ancestry-genealogy, contemporary, thrillers, us-no-amer

This novel by Sara Herchenroether is her debut novel and it's a good one! There are two timelines in this story, one in the early 1980's in New Mexico, involving a murdered mother and 2 children, and the second POV is current times, featuring 2 strong female leads who team together to solve this cold case.

One protagonist, Laura, is a recent breast cancer patient and there is a lot of focus in this novel on her illness, treatment, and struggles. However, Laura, a librarian, is on a mission to solve this case. I can only imagine after going through what she has medically, it must be a great outlet to work on and try to solve a meaningful, horrible crime. She is also an experienced genealogist who helps solve the case because of her ancestry experience. I really enjoyed this part of the story bc I love genealogy and librarians! LOL. I don't think I've ever met a librarian I didn't like and admire.

The other woman of this dynamic duo, Jean Martinez, is a long time, experienced detective, whose family longs for her to finally retire, but Jean is still determined to solve cold cases and this particular case with 3 murders, begs her to solve it.

I love the police procedural parts, the genealogical parts, and the combined brain power of these strong women. We get a ghostly POV from beyond the grave that may appeal to some of you. Unusual for sure!

It's fast and an easy read and so worth it.
My thanks to the author, NetGalley, and the publisher, TinHouse, for the ARC.

Thank you Netgalley for the advance reader copy of The Night Flowers by Sara Herchenroether in exchange for an honest review. This was a beautiful and haunting debut novel about amazing, strong women who came together to solve a mystery. It was wonderfully written and the characters were easy to empathize with.

A crime is committed in the desert and discovered years after the fact. Thirty years after that, two women are separately drawn to the case. I enjoyed the look at people's fascinations with cold cases, both from the cop and the layman's perspective. I personally enjoy a good god perspective as well and liked reading those passages. Overall this is a story about women and how their choices affect them both in this life and the next.

It's hard to come up with one thing that turned me off to this story as it was an overall feeling that kicked in not far from the first chapter. Maybe it wasn't enough of a lead in when trying to understand what was going on or maybe it was my mood, who knows, but it just didn't sit well with me. I had to force myself to keep reading even though I really wanted the killer caught and punished. Once I got to about 60% of the book, I skipped to near the end and should have skimmed instead.

I love the dedication of those who pursued the cold case in spite of having issues of their own. It was the story itself that was unsettling.

Thank you NetGalley for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest opinion.

This book wasn’t my cup of tea. I found it overly predictable and kind of boring. I like thrillers that keep me on the edge of my seat, and guessing until the very end, and this did not deliver. I found the characters kind of annoying and under developed.

Interesting story about three bodies that are discovered in barrels in New Mexico several years ago and the murderer hadn’t been caught or bodies identified. Told from Jean the cold case police investigator and Laura a librarian/genealogist who is going through breast cancer perspectives with some Italicized portions from the dead woman’s view. Flows well. Enjoyed the story, kept me engaged and wanting to know more and what had happened to these three females.

Thanks to Netgalley and W.M Norton & Company for my electronic advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest review.

The Night Flowers is definitely a fast, good read. For me I had a hard time putting it down I wanted to, no needed to know how this was all going to play out. Was not disappointed! Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher and the author for allowing me to read this and leave my opinion.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Tinhouse for the ARC of this book.

Great book on cold cases and strong females. I highly recommend this book. It had me thinking about it for days!

4 stars!

I LOVED this book, thrilling, twisty, dark at times but bright at others. Three strong POV from women that all come together for a thrilling ending that I was on the edge of my seat to finish! The author did a great job talking about cancer and relating it to death without dying but also shining light on the pain it brings to all who suffer from a diagnosis! This book got me out of my reading slump and I can’t recommend this enough! Great job Sara!!!

I love character-driven thrillers. I love that while I was reading this book I was more concerned with the journey than the destination. The most important thing to me wasn’t “whodunit” but “who were the victims?” Because this book doesn’t hold out a whole lot of hope for an arrest or even a solid suspect when it starts out, but what it does strive for is to put a name to the victims of the crimes that are central to the plot.

It’s a 30-year-old cold case with misplaced and missing paperwork, degraded evidence, and no witnesses. Detective Jean Martinez has transferred to Sierra County’s cold case bureau and wants to clear their department’s oldest cold case, or to at least give the victims their names back. And librarian Laura MacDonald comes across the case on a message board while she’s being treated for breast cancer (the author herself is a breast cancer survivor) and uses her spare time to research the case and then ventures into genealogical research to try and help to achieve the exact thing the detective is doing. Eventually, Laura takes a leap of faith and flies to New Mexico to present everything she has to the detective, and a kindredship is forged.

What I’m saying above doesn’t sound like a thriller, does it? Well, that’s because this book isn’t high-octane. It’s not the type of thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat. This is a simmering thriller, just tiny hot bubbles that keep pricking and poking at you. Maybe it’s even a little bit of a different burn at times, like the antiseptic burn of rubbing alcohol or the blistering heat of a sunburn. Maybe it’s the cold chill that makes you stop in your tracks or that feeling like someone’s just behind you that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It could even be the feeling that makes you feel like you’re suddenly some sort of prey. Most of the thrill comes from interlude scenes from the POV of the dead victims, who are present in some sort of spirit form, haunting the site where their bodies were found. To say more than that about those scenes, which range from poignant to gross, would be spoiler-iffic.

The separate and then woven together stories of Laura and Jean run parallel in that both women start out this book fighting off what they think is inevitable: Laura’s breast cancer has already taken so much from her and might eventually take more and Jean’s husband is dead set on her retiring in the next year or two, even though she is very clear that she’s not ready to give up her shield. But with her daughter about to give birth to her first child and the cold case bureau about to be cut down to part-time, Jean is starting to run out of time to close out this one case. But then Laura comes along with some new information, along with some new hope.

This is what I mean when I say this thriller is more about the journey than the destination. Of course we readers want to know who’s responsible for these crimes. Of course we want to know who was sick enough to do this. But that’s not the point of this book. The point of this book is about giving victims back their names and their voices. It’s about giving them back their families and their backgrounds. It’s about remembering the victims of crimes whose trails have long gone cold and no one seems to care about them anymore.

To an extent, this book is also about extolling the virtues of forensic genealogy, which has helped catch criminals like the Golden State Killer, but I have very conflicting feelings about this field on a personal level, so I’m not going to go into that here.

It’s a beautifully written book about a very brutal event and two women who just want to do something helpful with the years they have left in their lives. It’s terrific.

A copy of this title was provided to me by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Star Read/Crime Thriller/Ghost Story/Murder Thriller/OwnVoices/Suspense Mystery

🌷 A R C • R E V I E W 🌷
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Title: The Night Flowers
Author: Sara Herchenroether
Rating: 3.5/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️✨ (rounded up to 4 stars)
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Trigger warning right off the bat, this deal heavily with a character fighting cancer. There is many details surrounding this characters treatment and complications. If this is a triggering issue, I would recommend refraining because this is a major topic of conversation throughout the book.
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I liked this one; this was told in multiple points of view and followed three characters, one dead and two alive as the mystery of a cold case gets unraveled. I like how detailed Herchenroether got into the characters personal lives, it made me feel like I knew them. I liked how everything unfolded with the dead persons perspective. I thought the ending was good, but felt it maybe could have been executed a tad bit better.
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What did work for me was the incorrect medical jargon. Nothing bothers me more than when people who are not of the medical profession attempt to write medical issues and completely butcher it, seriously just ask for help - I’d gladly give it. I noted multiple things in this book that was incorrect and it was something that really irked me. I also wasnt a huge fan of the lack of chapters, rather the chapters were broken up into each characters section, which yes there was a separation, but I like a chapter to know when to stop reading hahah.
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Overall solid easy fast that kept me interested and invested in the story. I liked the mystery. Enjoyed how everything came together. I’ll definitely pick up more of her work in the future. The Night Flowers just released on May 2. Check it out!
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Thank you to @netgalley and @tinhouse for the earc in exchange for my honest review!

It is hard to believe The Night Flowers is a debut mystery from author Sara Herchenenroether, so sure footed is her story telling skill and command of natural sounding narrative language. Perhaps this impressed me overly much, because I read thiis right after reading a horrendously bad thriller that is inexplicably on the NY Times bestseller list, despite its amateurish writing. That was not the case here. Each thought, each conversational exchange, felt natural and true. Early on I highlighted one descriptive sentence i quite liked . It turned out to be one of many, but I'll quote it here since I saved it, " A man with a faintly British accent that sounded like perfumed Earl Grey in a porcelaiin teacup answered."

At the beginning of The Night Flowers, two hikers discover three bodies that have been hidden in barrels, deep in the forests of New Mexico. Once released from their hiding place, it is evident that these bodies have been there a long time, probably twenty years. We will not see these hikers again, but it is this discovery that sets the story into action. There are three POV's, a genealogist. a police detective, and the spirit of the woman found in the barrel. All three are women characters with their own story, and I was drawn into learning more about each of them.

Laura, the geneologist, is a cancer surviver. We learn snippets about her fight against the cancer and how it updended her life. Trying to find the identity of this woman and two girls found in a barrel has given Laura, a librarian, a purpose in her life which seems as if it has been blown apart. While the details of her cancer treatment are not a substantial part of the story, so excruciatingly realistic are the details, I had to pause in my reading to see a biography of the author. Sure enough, she is a cancer survivor. I sat beside my mother as she went through treatments and watched the huge toll it took on her, and this part of the story was very realistic.It was interesting to watch Laura almost doggedly search for answers to identify these victims and give them a name.

Jean, the police detective, is near retirement, and her husband is ready for her to take it, stay home, and give attention to their lives. Jean asks for his forbearance, the chance to solve this last cold case. Her investigations are leading her in a seemingly different direction than what Laura is discoving, doing her work remotely in another part of the country. But when Laura finally thinks she has the answers and comes to New Mexico to meet with the detective working the case, their paths will converge in the quest to find the identity of the victims, and maybe even find their killer.

As previously stated, I really enjoyed this story, which was a bit different because it was a cold case, and I enjoyed the two female leads. It was satisfying to see them work together and solve the case. This is mainly a police procedural, although there were also a lot of personal details about the main characters. I know the fashion today is to have a big splashy story, with a huge twist ending, but I found this well written and emotional story extremely satisfying to read. I look forward to the authors next story, and wonder if we might see these characters again in a future work.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author, and W.W.Norton and Company for allowing me to read an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

📚 The Night Flowers by Sarah Herchenrother 📚

Thank you @tin_house for the ARC!

I really love mysteries, especially ones that are a bit literary and that feature a location as a main character.

This book is not really a classic mystery, since it does include the voice of one of the victims and that voice/ ghost reveals parts of the mystery as the book goes along. The other two main characters are interesting and the way they work together is fun to read.

The cold case mystery is set in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, and in a small town called Truth or Consequences. The descriptions of the hikes and drives that the characters take, along with the lonely desert houses they find in their investigation made me feel like I was truly in a hot, dusty NM environment which I enjoyed. The mystery was not as expertly plotted as some I've read, especially with the ghost offering up info relatively often, but I still was curious and wanted to know how it would end, so that was a win. The genealogist's research was fascinating as well. The cancer backstory was something I found interesting, as it's rare to have a character go that in depth into their treatment in a novel and I appreciated that. The end of the book made me think that a sequel could be coming, and I would definitely read it!