The Garden Girls
The Garden Girls
By: Jessica R. Patch
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2024]
[Fulfilled ‘A Christian fiction book’ prompt as part of Shelf Reflection’s 2024 Reading Challenge]
“I know the kinds of things that await me. I know what evil men can do.”
This is my first Jessica Patch book and I loved it!
It was suspenseful from start to finish. The opening prologue begins with a woman’s attempted escape from her captor. The action and intensity continues to the very end as a last rescue attempt is made in the middle of a hurricane on the Outer Banks.
Patch writes Christian fiction so one of the best parts of the book is that there is no swearing or graphic sexual content. It’s felt increasingly harder to find mainstream books without all of that so I’m glad to find a Christian author that can still write good (but clean) thrillers.
I would say Patch is in league with Steven James’s books. The Garden Girls felt a lot like James’s Patrick Bowers series about a serial killer. And if you like one of these authors, you’re sure to like the other.
They both get into the nitty gritty and aren’t afraid of portraying evil or killing off characters. Patch’s writing may have slightly more overt Christian undertones. James writes about moral and ethical questions and mentions God, but Patch writes more specifically about a character’s faith journey.
I will say, though, that I thought she did this in an organic and natural way. I have been a bit (probably overly) critical of a lot of Christian fiction for being cheesy or unnatural. But I didn’t feel that while reading this book.
The Plot and Characters
The Garden Girls is an intense thriller about a serial killer who abducts women with flower names and tattoos them with flowers from neck to thigh: blooms when they obey, buds when they don’t.
He has a secret garden in his house with human-sized bird cages where he puts them on display to dance for him.
So yeah. Pretty disturbing. I hadn’t thought about the concept of an abductor tattooing his victims which is such a permanent and flamboyant way to traumatize someone.
“You’re part of my private garden now. I’m going to teach you how to bloom.”
It’s got NCIS/Criminal Minds vibes with their SCU team (Strange Crimes Unit) which specializes in hunting down “sickos who kill people based on their religious beliefs.”
Here’s the team:
Ty (our main character) is the impulsive, smart aleck of the group and their resident religious behavioral analyst. He had left a cult as a teenager and had coped with his abusive childhood by studying religions and the psychology behind them.
They’ve got Selah, their computer hacker/analyst.
“Violet [the psychologist] had a superpower. She could slide into the brain of a serial killer and was rarely wrong.”
“Owen was a great geopattern theorist, and his work helped them triangulate where killers might live or work and where they hunted based on geographical patterns.” (just like Patrick Bowers…)
Asa is the father-figure, Special Agent in Charge.
Fiona is the profiler.
[It may be best to read the other books first or you might read a few little spoilers: Violet’s story is in Patch’s book A Cry in the Dark. Asa and Fiona’s story is in her book Her Darkest Secret. Both, I believe, also have serial killers]
Ty’s team takes on this case in the Outer Banks because the killer has a beef with Ty and is acting out his revenge.
“Tiberius would pay for his sins— pride at the top of the list. When he finally fell to his face, he would be humbled, humiliated and held accountable.”
The case gets even more personal when he finds out that a girl from his cult that he had fallen in love with as a teen—Bexley— and had planned to marry and escape the cult with all those years ago is still alive. And her younger sister, who he had also cared for, is now one of the missing girls.
To add to the turmoil he’s already feeling, he discovers Bexley had a son who is now 15. And Ty is the father.
Ty’s world is crashing down, the killer always five steps ahead, and just as they are getting answers to their questions, a cat 5 hurricane is bearing down on the East coast, threatening not only the missing women’s lives but their ability to finish the investigation and catch the killer.
“Ty wasn’t sure which scared him more— the unstoppable hurricane or the possibility that someone might be killing people as part of a revenge scheme against him.”
There is action and surprises up to the very end.
The Faith Part
I appreciate the way she showed the main character (Ty) with his transparent feelings toward religion and Christianity which were influenced by his cult upbringing, but how his relationship with his friends (who had their own faith journeys in other books) did life with him and their words and experiences helped penetrate the walls Ty had built up against God.
I thought it made a lot of sense to show how he came to the end of himself.
“He’d believed in no one but himself, and he was spent, stretched as far as one man could be stretched, feeling it in every beat of his heart and in every breath.”
That’s how it is for all of us. We think we can be in charge of our lives and that we have everything under control. If we just work hard enough and try long enough we can do anything, we can make it through anything.
But faith requires dependency on something (some One) outside of yourself. It doesn’t take too long to realize that we don’t have it in us. We are not enough on our own. There is not some magic in the fibers of our bodies that allow us to handle hard things.
There is grace. And mercy. And peace. And they come from a sovereign and powerful God who loves us.
That story was evident in The Garden Girls in a real life kind of way. There was real life suffering and grief. Real darkness. And then real light and hope even in the midst of loss.
I think that was an honest way to portray it because the Christian life is not a promise of an easy, care-free life of luxury. We are not called to endure nothing. But we persevere the hardship with the strength of the One who sustains the world and sustains our every breath and we know we can trust him.
Randos
I wanted to commend Jessica Patch on this well-placed cultural reference to a wonderful show:
“I’ll put this slow cooker on Warm unless you’re still freaked out about it since watching This Is Us.”
The book is mostly told in third-person, but the writing voice does change styles depending what character is the focus. This got to be a little confusing at times to know what perception we were getting.
Ty’s is the main voice and we probably should have had more of that. But there were times we were in the killer’s mind or in Bexley’s mind.
There was one first person POV from one of the women who was abducted.
Ty’s writing voice sections had more humor and sarcasm, Bexley’s had more anxiety and the others were meant to be more mysterious.
I thought Patch did a good job of creating unique characters with their own personalities and quirks. At times I wondered if the slang used for the son was too over-the-top, but it probably is how teenagers talk. I’m not around enough of them to know. But I do know ‘bussin’ is a thing so there’s that.
For the most part, I liked the way she wrote. She seems to have a good handle on humor and sarcasm and not all writers can do that realistically.
When they were going to get a sketch of the tattoo artist but the guy wasn’t going to get to it until Saturday I knew what was going to happen. In real life, if you’re about to get a sketch of a potential killer and you’re short on time you tell the guy to sketch that thing at home and text a picture of it! You don’t say- well, I guess we have to wait several days, he’s not scheduled to work. Hope he doesn’t call in sick!
I get that the sketch needed to come into play later for the suspense unfolding as Patch intended but I wish there was at least a better reason for the delay in getting that sketch so it made more sense than just waiting til the guy’s next shift of work.
Spoilers
These are MAJOR spoilers so scroll right past to the next dots to skip over them and read my recommendation. Or if you want my thoughts on some of the reveals, continue forth.
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I’m mostly satisfied with how everything ended up/was revealed, but one thing that I’m still trying to figure out is the tattooing.
Did Garrick do all the tattooing then? He was around that much to get that much tattooing done? And would Garrick listen to Lysander on what he wanted tattooed? How involved was Garrick?
It doesn’t really fit that Lysander was the tattooer, but the parts told from the killer’s POV call him The Artist. Without re-reading the whole book, my remembrance says it doesn’t really make sense that those parts were Garrick.
I guess I need more information about that tattoo aspects in relation to Garrick and Lysander.
I’m also not sure how much Ahnah was involved in. It seems like she was aware of what Lysander was doing with the girls. Knowing her background, it seems weird that she would have been okay with that kind of torture being done to women, especially the deaths.
I know those who are abused often end up abusing others. I also know Lysander had groomed Ahnah and she had loved him at one point, so it’s not like he was a stranger she was working with.
But it still feels hard to believe she was part of all that.
I really liked Owen’s character and was sad with how his story ended. But I also think it was a really neat and momentous aspect of Ty’s faith journey. Dang, though, that was an emotional scene!
“Live in the light.”
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SPOILERS OVER!!!
Recommendation
Even though this is classified as a Christian fiction book, I would recommend this one to all readers. Especially if you enjoy intense thrillers, or serial killer thrillers.
The ‘Christian stuff’ doesn’t take you out of the story, but rather enhances the character development and it’s not preachy or cheesy. (Well, I’m sure there’s someone out there who will disagree with me, but out of all the Christian fiction books out there, this is on the very ‘less preachy’ side of the spectrum).
If you don’t do well with serial killer books, you won’t want to read this one. The killer is a formidable opponent with a lot of evil.
I’m excited to have found Jessica Patch and look forward to reading some of her other books.
Disclaimer: I will say that she writes books like these and she also writes for ‘Love Inspired Suspense’ and the book covers for books with that organization are less than appealing to me. If any of you have read her books in those series, let me know how or if they’re a different kind of book than this. The covers make the books seem more like a Nancy Drew type of book. But if the writing is the same, I can look past the cover for the story. I may have to try one and see for myself.
[Content Advisory: no swear words- it’s written that a character curses but doesn’t say the word; no graphic sexual content but the abducted women are naked and there is some sexual perversion with a few of the characters]
This book just released April 1, 2024. You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.
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