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Title: The Fifth Petal by Brunonia Barry
Details: Copyright 2017, Penguin Random House LCC
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "BELOVED AUTHOR BRUNONIA BARRY RETURNS WITH THIS SPELLBINDING NEW THRILLER OF SEDUCTION, MAGIC, AND MURDER.
COULD A WITCH HUNT HAPPEN AGAIN IN SALEM?
When a teenage boy dies suspiciously, Salem's chief of police, John Rafferty, wonders if there is a connection between his death and a notorious decades old cold case dubbed "The Goddess Murders," in which three young women --all descended from accused Salem witches-- were slashed to death. He finds help in Callie Cahill, the grown daughter of one of the victims, newly returned to town. Neither believes that the main suspect, Rose Whelan, an eccentric local historian, is guilty of murder or witchcraft.
But exonerating Rose might mean crossing paths with a dangerous force. Were the Goddesses victims of an all-too-human vengeance, or was the devil raised in Salem that night? And if they cannot discover what truly happened twenty years ago, will evil rise again?"
Why I Wanted to Read It: I've talked about my disinterest in crime fiction and why, but after the most recent crime fiction I read, Gillian Flynn's Dark Places, was so good and flew in the face of my usual proclivities, I decided to give this a try. Plus, I'm usually down for (w)itches in fiction, although accepting that the Pagan/actual Witch element will usually be misinformed at best and sensationalized trash at worst.
How I Liked It: Quick, what's your favorite historical event? Something you know a lot about and about which you will generally read any book, watch any documentary, or sit through just about any movie/TV series! If it's a disaster, that's actually pretty common, if not the most common of all.
Look at the fascination with wars, natural disasters, shipwrecks, and the like. Whether it's the Titanic sinking, the Kennedy assassination, or just that perpetual favorite, World War II, generally we all have at least one period of history that fascinates us, and it's more often than not likely something we wouldn't have wanted to have experienced first hand.
The Salem Witch Trials are particularly evergreenly popular history since they're so ripe for reevaluation. The othering, misogyny, racism, and religious intolerance at the heart of the trials draws constant parallels to the present (marginalized groups bearing the brunt of blame for disasters can be steadily traced through American history from Japanese Americans forced into internment camps for Pearl Harbor, to the gay community being castigated for AIDS, to Muslims and 9/11, and to the current deadly blaming of Asian-Americans/Pacific Islanders for the Coronavirus), and the term "witch hunt" is as popular as ever in American political (and social) discourse.
The rise of awareness about Paganism and real life Witches in the United States has further complicated and increased interest, especially since the fairytale witch has always been a part of the Salem myth and legend.
So it's not surprising that authors are still eager to use the Salem Witch Trials as a backdrop for the exploration of themes both modern and continuing. So how does this book fare?
The book begins on the day after Halloween, 1989, in the aftermath of a hideous multiple murder. A detective is trying to question a five-year-old that witnessed the murder of her mother and two of her mother's friends during a ritual to consecrate the land where the bodies of the Salem accused were supposedly put hundreds of years before. A third friend and fourth woman, a respected Salem historian, survived the attack and yanked the little girl to safety, hiding her in the bushes and pressing a rosary in her hands and telling her to pray. The child clutches the rosary so hard it leaves (wait for it!) the indentation of a five-petaled rose in her hand.
Smash-cut to Halloween 2014. The respected Salem historian who survived is now a raving homeless woman, so damaged since the night of the murders, paranoid and obsessed with trees and talking to them. A teenage boy dies in her presence, and all the gossip and speculation of the cold case is suddenly brought back with a vengeance.
The five-year-old survivor we met at the beginning is now a grown woman working as a sound therapist and hears about the story on the news. "Saved" by nuns and shuttled to various foster homes, she was told the woman who rescued her and who helped raise her, her "Auntie Rose" was dead.
So begins a journey into her past and the present where she (sort of) teams up with the chief of police to solve the mystery once and for all.
I'll say it upfront: this book suffers considerably by comparison given the last thriller I read was the excellent Dark Places. In that book, the author had a lot of moving parts, but more or less, was able to keep them in motion and tied to one another and achieved a more or less satisfying conclusion.
In The Fifth Petal, there are far more moving parts and the author does little to anything with ANY of them.
There's a decades old cold case, the recent death that restarts all of this, the connections to the Salem Witch Trials and a mystery, the chief of police's possible strained relationship with his wife and alcoholism and possible infidelity, the chief of police's wife's troubled history, a totally unnecessary and tacked on romance, some small town gossip and affairs, some buried family secrets, a ridiculous romantic "rivalry" so abruptly dropped you wonder why it existed in the first place, a massive police cover-up for decades, an embarrassingly trite backstory given to the "Goddess Murders" which were apparently called that because the young women were so beautiful they were like Goddesses or maybe they thought they WERE Goddesses why bother with the distinction and also they had a really half-assed sex cult or at least sex club including thank you notes, land disputes, long-buried grudges, and somehow even more I'm simply not going to get into because this sentence has run on long enough.
If that all weren't convoluted enough, the dialog and scenes are frequently ridiculously simple and no character appears to speak distinctively, despite the cast ranging across class and age and background. Also, there's plenty of action that it feels like a middle school English teacher would strike out as excessive. If, for example, we know that a character's mother was murdered, we don't need to hear when they respond about grief "she said, thinking of her mother" (italics mine). We know she was thinking of her mother because that's a giant plot point. Also, if a character makes a clearly humorous statement, we don't really need to know they "joked." Even just "cracked" or "with a smirk" would suffice to communicate the character is not being serious. Excessive description of action like that ruins the flow in a story that's not trying to do as much as this book is.
So you've got multiple, massively bogged down plots with little done with them that are tedious to read on top of that. What about the actual thriller and mystery?
Well, there's a resolution, but I'll offer right now it's ridiculous and absolutely not worth it. If I complained (mildly, mind!) that the previous thriller I read didn't always tie off its loose ends, this book ties them all off in the most ridiculous, over-the-top, and "really boringly straining credibility" way possible.
For my admitted bias against crime fiction because so much of it is trite, relies on tropes, and is blatantly, annoyingly unrealistic, I have to confess that I'm willing to forgive a lot in service to a good, compelling story, largely because a good, compelling story makes you forget those things. So when I'm inundated with thoughts like "That's not how memory works. That's not how trauma works. That's not how any of that would work." which I absolutely was with this book, that not only means the author didn't do the research in that department (and in this day and age that's particularly unforgivable), that means the story isn't compelling enough to distract me from those things.
But what about Salem? What about the reason this whole book is based there and tied to the Witch Trials? Arthur Miller famously used the trials as an allegory for McCarthyism. Even far lesser, semi-recent works like Jodi Picoult's Salem Falls borrowed the Witch Trials as a contrast to the growing modern Paganism movement because she "wanted the Witches to be the ones doing the accusing." As trash as Salem Falls was (any time there's a false sexual assault allegation in fiction, the author should tread carefully and Picoult didn't, and that's just one of the many failings of that book), at least it had a purpose for the tie-in.
Aside from the surface details (the women who were murdered died doing a ritual to honor their murdered ancestors), there's really nothing that touches on the reasons why the Salem Witch Trials stay relevant in this book, save for some half-hearted attempts at small town gossip "ruining" someone, which given that that really doesn't go anywhere either, seems truly tacked on.
Hundreds of years later, the Salem Witch Trials are truly a ripe and as relevant as ever source of inspiration. Whether it be a reimagining that's straightforwardly historical, or more fanciful, or set in the modern day in a any number of guises to show that the small-mindedness and hysteria that fueled murder and torture in the 1600s is still alive today in a different form, there's so many ways that the Trials could be adapted and explored, to say nothing of Salem the city itself and how it reckons with its history. It's just a shame that a book that so clearly wrapped itself superficially in the event didn't want to truly bother.
Notable: Whenever you have a cast that largely lacks certain diversity, the diversity you do show then becomes more scrutinized. The sole queer character is the closeted husband of a town busybody (who is clearly in denial about his being gay) who died by suicide because he had AIDS.
Side note with that, rather troublingly, a supposedly hip and intelligent character actually uses the phrase "heterosexual HIV":
"And something else. A number of cases of heterosexual HIV were diagnosed on the North Shore right about that time. The sexual revolution might have brought sex out of the proverbial closet, but AIDS made it lethal. Someone started a rumor the Goddesses were spreading it." (pg 217)
Now, in fairness, the character is thinking back to 1989 and presumably the mindset at that time. But would that phrase come so trippingly off the mouth of, again, a supposedly open-minded character? Wouldn't "HIV" suffice? Or "HIV cases outside the gay community"?
Back to the only queer character in the book. In addition to dying by suicide because he had AIDS, another character who last saw him when she was five-years-old (seriously, how many memories of things do you have pre-five? Particularly of events, places, and things you never saw again until you're an adult, and didn't, say, discuss with people, or see pictures of, or hear stories about?) and mentions casually
"I remember the painter," she said. "He was a friend of Rose's."
"Was he one of their conquests?" Rafferty asked.
"No, he wasn't one of them. I remember him as a very nice older gentleman. I think... well, as I recall him, he was probably gay."
Rafferty had heard this from one of the officers as well. It seemed to be the best-kept secret in town; one of the only people who didn't know was Helen. (pg 395)
Now, we aren't given any further information as to why an adult is making that determination out of a memory from when they were five-years-old, but I'm guessing him having a male companion or several male companions (and ONLY male companions) might be one thing, him being "effeminate" or have traits to which people assign stereotypes is quite another (and basically the only thing we learn about this character aside from him dying by suicide because he had AIDS is that he painted pictures, including a mural). That's... questionable, particularly given the follow up that "the whole town" seemed to know.
In less representation, and more "it's-super-clear-you-didn't-do-the-research", the book touches on Paganism in a perfunctory way (the murdered women are referred to as "Goddesses" after all) and there's a Pagan Witch who's particularly unlikable (although "Witch" and "psychic" are used a bit interchangeably) but not much by way of information about Paganism and Witchcraft other than suggestion (including the revelation that someone does animal sacrifices, which is at least shown that that person has gone too far) and the outdated and increasingly little-used terms "black magic" and "white magic" (quick note here: magic involves a lot of your associations and you think "white" equals beneficial and "black" equals malicious/evil, you probably shouldn't do any more magic until you rethink that).
Most amusingly however, the Celtic God Dagda is named, and the characters even use shorthand "Dag" in a way that's clear it sounds like "Dad", meaning they're pronouncing it the way it looks, "DAG-dah". That is not how you pronounce that name.
I've seen it pronounced anywhere from "DOW-dah" to "DOG-dah" to "DAW-dYAW". Given that it's Celtic, it's not likely to be pronounced the way you see it, and even the 101 books I've read explain that.
But okay, it wouldn't be completely out there for a couple of novices that are clearly just using the name they got from somewhere (101 books certainly existed in 1989 and definitely would've existed in Salem, but they might have not even gotten that far). Given the rest of the author's research, though, you do have to wonder.
Final Grade: C-
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