The Reaping (Steinbeck and Reed, #2)

by Jess Lourey

Until age seventeen, Evangeline had lived in a commune run by a cruel but charismatic man by the name of Frank Roth. She’d escaped when the feds apprehended Roth for tax evasion. The arrest had been a media circus. The women and girls of “Frank’s Farm” were led out, paraded in front of the cameras, each of them displaying signs of active shock, all of them wearing sack dresses in plain gray cloth

“It’s got Matty the Mallet hammered all over it, pun intended. Same as the 1998 cold case.”

The unsolved murder of the Korhonen family in the town of Alku, a village sixteen miles southwest of Duluth, haunted the northland. Husband, wife, and three children under the age of ten

When you went home, you came back to the person you used to be, for better or worse.

It all reminded Harry that he was the reason his sister had never been found.

“With the veri noita defeated, the disloyal villagers next turned to the original seven families, the veri noita’s truest followers.” He began breathing heavily. “They murdered all their children, every last one of them, in an event that came to be known as the reaping.”

“We shouldn’t do anything for the dead. We have only one job on this earth, and it has to do with the living: we must love those put in our path as hard as we can, every day.”