Holy cow this book was good. I mean really, really good. I'm kicking myself for taking so long to read it. This is one of the best plots I've read and I read a lot. The characters could have been fleshed out a little more but hopefully there will be a second book to do that. I loved the rapport between the two detectives and they had me laughing quite a bit. Also, having lived in the Boston area, I am very familiar with the landmarks and the story used them quite well. I had a hard time putting this book down to take care of my family. Absolutely supurb.

2 Stars. This book is about two detectives, Marti and Neil, and their search for a serial killer who kills his victims and carves angel wings into their skin.
I was intrigued by this book because of the premise. Mindhunter means Hannibal Lecter? Sign me up. However I didn't feel like it lived up to those comparisons. I really did like the descriptions of the crime scenes and the autopsies. They were very descriptive and vivid and gruesome really, but I felt that that was the only strong point of the novel.
The characters felt very flat and 2 dimensional and didn't have a lot of substance to them. I didn't feel connected to any of our main characters. We get to know about Marti through some backstory on her life but while it was supposed to add something to the story, I didn't think it made any difference. Her personality was very flip-floppy throughout the entirety of the novel. One minute she's intimidated and scared by a suspect she's interviewing and the next second she's yelling and demanding answers from them. I also felt that the ending was completely rushed and I felt unsatisfied by the way it ended. It seemed too easy and everything seemed to wrap up too perfectly.
All in all I felt that the book could have had more substance. it had an interesting plot but I don't think it was developed as much as it could have been. To me it seemed like a less developed episode of Law and Order.

The Pvritan felt like more than a messy first draft than a completed novel. There are too many cliches, relationships that come and go from the novel in a matter of pages, themes that are left unexplored for almost half the book, characters that feel flimsy and see-through, and flashbacks to Puritan times that don’t seem to serve any purpose other than to make the title obvious. The story was pretty engaging, but as a whole, the book left a bad impression.

Scheduled to post 1/2/21.

Where did I stop? 13% in

Why? It just wasn't keeping my attention. While the premise seemed really interesting, the writing was just kind of blah. No flair to it, clinical at times, and wandered off into backstory or superfluous detail a lot that drew me away from the actual plot. The emphasis on gangs was kind of irking me and I can't really put my finger on why. It was attempting to be vaguely aware, but with two white protagonists I was getting a little bit of a white savior vibe from it along with some othering that was both overly negative and simultaneously sympathetic that just seemed kind of odd. Again, I can't quite articulate it and I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but something in that arena irked me. Obviously I didn't not finish the book so I don't know how this pans out. This is just my first impression of it. It is secondary to me just not liking the writing and not being drawn into the story. Had I actually liked the writing I would have kept reading.

Enjoyed this story, the darkness and intrigue, the twists and turns. A serial killer with religious convictions defiles his victims bodies by carving their skin into wings. While the flashbacks are well written, and, I suppose, are written to give insight into the motives of our killer, they feel out of place. I would have loved to go a bit more indepth into the flow of decisions the serial killer makes, - we dive into untangling the psychological aspects via third person observations.. Overall a good procedural detective read.

Thank you NetGalley for this advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

An old-school serial killer manhunt, The Puritan undoubtedly owes a lot to the books of Thomas Harris – notably The Silence of The Lambs and Red Dragon – and to TV series like Criminal Minds and Mindhunter. In particular there’s a big tip of the hat to Agent Clarice Starling: not only is the protagonist cut from similar cloth but the killer communicates by cramming messages into his victim’s intimate orifices.

The author definitely doesn’t attempt to bend the accepted conventions of the genre, so we have a killer who uses gruesome methods to despatch and display his victims. A female detective takes the lead in the investigation, and pushes herself and her colleagues to bring some small measure of justice to the dead. And to locate and stop the murderer, she must get inside his head to understand his sickening inspiration…

This plot is delivered at a decent pace, without unnecessary literary frills or flourishes. The author has an engaging, accessible style of writing, and concentrates on proficient storytelling rather than deep, meaningful moments of soul-searching. Her protagonist, Boston homicide Detective Marti Zucco, is a plain-speaking, likeable type who follows the evidence to solve a mystery which is more of a police procedural than it is a story of psycho profiling.

In fact, we learn little about the killer or his psychotic pathology from his perspective. Instead there’s a series of flashbacks to ghoulish historical interludes, which reveal the horrors of the Salem witch trials in all their brutal ignorance. It’s up to Detective Zucco to unravel the modern day mystery and stop the killer in his tracks – when her colleagues are all too ready to assume this is just a weird spree of gangland rivalry.

For all its grisly subject matter, this is a surprisingly easy read. The author doesn’t bring anything particularly new to the party but she delivers a tense, carefully constructed thriller. She also avoids the pitfalls of many modern ‘psychological thrillers’. This story doesn’t get bogged down in domestic dramas, nor is it ruined by a cascade of increasingly improbable plot twists. Instead, The Puritan delivers a solidly satisfying experience – and I’ll look out for more from this author.

8/10

Police procedurals are generally not my thing. They are formulaic and predictable, and I find them boring for the most part. This book was plenty of the former none the latter. It was very tense and the killer’s modus operandi was pretty disturbing and creepy. The writing and pacing were great and the character development was above par. I look forward to reading more of her work.

Say thy prayers,
ye devil-tongued fools,
lest the Wing-Maker come for you.

When a series of ritualistically killed, mutilated bodies start appearing in different parts of Boston, it's up to the two detectives to catch the culprit and find out the motives, before the body count increases.

This is more like Dexter meets Hannibal, but minus the sass and cannibalism. Such an interesting premise, and cool cover! The story is fast-paced, gripping, and intriguing. The atmosphere is kinda dark and gritty what with the glimpses into the witch trials and mindless religious fanatics. The characters are so well-written, and the slight humour is well-placed to cut down on the dark overtones but I'd have preferred it if it didn't, like, give me something proper dark, lol.

There was one problem though, nothing annoys me more when the 'strong, lead female detective' starts getting 'hots' for 'the bad guy', like?! Please go home? Lol! There were a few unanswered questions left at the end that I would have liked explored further, but overall it was an enjoyable read.

Thanks to Netgalley, author, and publishers for the eARC. All opinions are my own.

I am very much afraid I found this one a dreary, by the numbers serial killer novel. I felt the characters were paper thin and stereotypical and the atmosphere completely lacking, as if there were too much distance between the author and what she was writing.

Reminiscent of early Deaver books. Edge of your seat thrills with just a tinge of terror. Highly recommended

I enjoyed this book a lot. Murder mysteries are interesting to me, and this one was really well done. Smart, dark, gritty. The partner "Neil" was a little obnoxious, but the main character, "Marti" was well-written and fleshed out.

Good descriptive techniques of the murder scenes, well-written autopsy scenarios.

Highly recommended.

"The Puritan" tells the story of a Boston homicide detective on the trail of a serial killer who kills his victims for religious reasons. The main story is intercut with flashbacks to Puritan times. The flashbacks act almost as separate short stories within the novel, explaining the historical and religious significance of each of the modern day serial killer's murders. While I enjoyed the flashbacks and thought that it gave a unique twist to the standard police procedural/serial killer thriller, the main story was a little too convoluted for me. There were parts of the story when I was genuinely lost as to what was actually going on. A few sentences or paragraphs of explanation would have been helpful to keep the story flowing and not made the transitions so jarring and hard to follow.

A MAN'S BODY is found hanging in the Boston Common, his eyes missing and skin mutilated beyond recognition, transforming him into a winged demon. Weeks later, a young girl's body is discovered under a layer of ice, her skin carved into angel wings.

Boston Homicide Detective Marti Zucco and her partner, Detective Neil Cavanaugh, are in a race against time to stop the wing-maker, a twisted psychopath who has left a trail of complex clues. A gang-ridden path that will take them through the gates of Hell and into an underground world of sexual perversion.

For Marti, her faith will be tested as more bodies continue to mount and she walks among the ghosts, following in the footprints of the killer known as the Puritan.

This is a real page turner, I was totally engrossed from the beginning! I loved both of the lead Detectives; Marti, the serious one trying to make her dad proud and Neil, the one who has to make jokes at the most inappropriate times!

This is a great pick for thriller fans looking for a quick read!

Gripping crime thriller,

I love the setting, that’s what makes it stand out. I got drawn right in to the story and the twisty last few chapters were excellent.

The Pvritan is your typical horror thriller about a serial killer operating in Boston. The plot follows the lead detective on the case, Marti Zucco and her partner Neil Cavanaugh as they try to piece together the evidence connecting the gruesome murders where the killer hangs their victims, makes “wings” from their skin, brands them and leaves messages from an ancient Bible inside their bodies.
This modern story however opens with a scene from 17th century Boston. The murders and the reasons for the murders in 21st century mirror the 17th century scenes and give us, the reader, a slight advantage over the detectives.
Marti and Neil are your standard detective partners – completely different but work together well. She is a single woman unable to keep a guy, really unwilling to tie herself to an idiot, but hey. Neil is a chubby hubby and father of one, soon to be two, kids. They work with their colleagues and work to solve this case before the killer strikes again.
Now, there are several reasons why I gave this novel only 2.5 stars.
First let’s talk about the characters. All the characters are almost cardboard cut-outs or caricatures of typical murder mystery characters. The other detectives in the precinct and in the suburbs are lazy and don’t really want to put in any extra work, their boss sends in for outside assistance from Behavioural Unit. The single moms are flirty, smokers that dress inappropriately. The married moms are protective momma bears who are dominated by their husbands. The dads are either absent because reasons or are pater familias with all the emotional understanding of a slug. The leader of the Satanist cult is a person who is able to seduce a woman on the other side of a one-way mirror (also, giving off vibes of the “vampire” character from BBC’s Luther). Poor overuse of murder mystery tropes.
You just never connect with any of the characters. Not even Marti. You learn about her past but her personality is so all over the place that you can’t seem to grab a hold of her. She is a brainiac who knows all the Latin names of all the birds that surround her and who doesn’t eat poultry because she once took care of a bird with a broken wing. She is also a person who can’t guess that an A branded on the skin of a victim stands for “adultery,” even though she’d just spent time researching and realising that M stands for “murder,” W for “witchcraft” and B for “bestiality.” She has a strange aversion to tattoos and really looks down on anyone who is crazy enough to mar their skin with drawings. She is scared of a person she is interviewing in one moment and in the next she gets all up in his face for no reason at all… You see what I mean? Just all over the face.
Even with 2D characters I could have enjoyed this novel had the plot been presented in a better way. The story points sometimes get lost. The big revelations in the investigation come every once in a while, like in any other murder mystery. And as in many, they are presented in the form of a slight cliff-hanger. But, what Märgen does next is just swoosh past the information. She doesn’t give it to us but instead we get these jumps in time and we are left hanging there. I don’t mind working for my content, but this was a bit much.
In addition to this, there are so many false routs she takes us on and presents in detail that we are almost fooled for a moment, but then a revelation comes that this was just a detour and in fact another path is the right one. Of course, to make thigs worse, she doesn’t explain the right path either. For instance, there is no explanation why these 17th century executions are copied. We know, or we can guess, where the killer found out about them but we don’t know for sure. We also don’t know why the mutilation, why the staging. Did the killer think he was making them into angels? Did they repent and he saw himself as taking them to heaven? There is no explanation why these victims were chosen?
All in all, a weak attempt at a story that had so much potential.

The Puritan is an exciting and creepy crime thriller about a serial killer who is dubbed by the media "The Wing Maker". The victims are branded with a letter and a piece of a 16th century bible, The Geneva Bible, is lodged somewhere on their person. Is this killer on a crusade? This is the question posed to Boston PD Detectives Marti Zucco and Neil Cavanaugh as they do everything in their power to stop him, with their investigation taking them to the darker underbelly of Boston.

Its a while since I have read a really gripping serial killer thriller. I read 60% of this in one day - I was hooked from the first page. The storyline gave me serious chills and I literally couldn't put it down. It is so fast paced with likeable lead characters in a dark and disturbing atmosphere. Boston is a great setting for this book and there are a few chapters featuring the Pilgrims from the 1600's that settled in Boston. I also loved how some of the locals' accents were written in the Bostonian accent. There are also chapters featuring the killer and giving us some insight in to his mindset which I really liked.

The last few chapters are very exciting and lead to a great climax, with plenty of twists and turns to keep me turning the pages. However, there were a few loose threads and unanswered questions that I would have liked explored further but all in all, an excellent and riveting read. 4*

This is a book set in the modern era with occasional flashbacks to the 1600s when a Geneva Bible, which is the centerpiece of The Pvritan, first came to our shores. The flashbacks serve no real purpose except perhaps to illustrate the mindset of the book's villain but they are well written and add a lot of atmosphere.

Birgitte Märgen does a great job at establishing a foreboding atmosphere rife with dread and menace. The Pvritan is well worth reading for this. However she does take a few shortcuts here and there and the book might annoy detail oriented readers who prefer crossed t's and dotted i's.

The PVRITAN by Birgette Margen was a dark and disturbing read. I really enjoyed it! It takes place in Boston and follows homicide detective Marti, a woman with a somewhat troubled past. Someone is killing people, displaying them and gruesome ways, and leaving Bible verses in their bodies from an old Geneva Bible which is what the Puritans used in the 1600’s. I love the way that this book intertwined the history and present day. The author did a fabulous job of keeping the killer‘s identity a secret. I had no clue who was the murderer. Some readers may not like the gruesomeness of the murders. However, that does not bother me and it only added to the creepy factor of this book. I hope there will be more books from this author because this one was really good. Make sure to read this one! Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Marketed as Mindhunter meets Hannibal Lecter, this book synopsis had me right from the hook. We follow detectives Marti Zucco and her partner, Neil Cavanaugh, as they look for the killer who has been branding and mutilating their victims into grotesque angels. Their search leads them all around the Boston area as they try to connect the dots between their very diverse victims and the secrets they held. This is a fantastically crafted detective thriller and the comparisons to Thomas Harris are well-earned. This book was nearly perfect for me right up until the last 5 pages or so which was a real disappointment.

Overall, this novel has a fantastic atmosphere and setting. It is a split POV with most chapters following Marti and Neil's investigation, but we do get some chapters from the killer's POV as well as flashbacks to 1600s Boston. Märgen's descriptions are hauntingly beautiful yet simple so the reader doesn't get bogged down with the prose. The narrative is almost deceptively simple but manages to build on itself over the course of a scene to really increase the atmospheric setting. These more simple scenes are then used to highlight the occasional dream or possible hallucinations that some characters have. These dream sequences are extremely vivid and often unsettling and bizarre which only added to the overall tone of the novel. The best comparison for the overall tone would be the Hannibal TV series - it is very similar with the dream-like sequences, the brutal killings, and the pockets of dry humor stuck in odd places. (The Hannibal TV series is, in my opinion, one of the most perfectly written and structured TV series I've ever seen and I think everyone should watch it). Marti's partner Neil is a great tension release with his smooth talking witnesses and occasional jokes. He felt like a sort of *wink wink nudge nudge* sense of humor which worked well to ease up the tension in a scene just enough for the reader to take a breath before diving back into the darkness.

The overall plotting of the investigation was very well done. With all the detective fiction books I've read and TV shows I've watched, I can often predict what turn the case may take or what 'secret' the detectives would discover next. However, in this case, I was completely blown away at what I felt were original and unique avenues for the investigation to go. It was still a standard investigation, no rule breaking or going rogue or anything like that. But when they enter the home of the third victim and find it littered with [thing I can't say because of spoiler reasons] I was pleasantly surprised that I in no way called what they would find. I thought the investigation followed all the leads to their fullest extent before completely excluding that line of inquiry. I do wish we would have gotten more action in the investigation - it was mostly Marti and Neil driving around Boston asking questions (which I fully acknowledge is like 99% of actual police work). I thought the chapters in the killer's POV were interesting and did a good job of characterizing the killer, but I think they could have been used to amp up the action if we got the killer watching the victims or their mental state in the aftermath of the kills. Overall, the 'thriller' aspects really ramped up in the last 10% of the book and up until then it was a pretty standard police investigation with no real threats of danger or thriller. However, the investigation was still really interesting and I didn't find it dry or boring.

Now on to where I feel the novel took a really hard nose dive: the ending. In general, my issues with the ending can be wrapped up in the fact that there wasn't any sort of come down or resolution chapter. There's the big confrontation at the end and then, if this was a movie, it would snap to black and credits would roll. I've never met a book that handled the ending this way and liked how it was done. Most of the time, it simply leads to a big case of emotional whiplash where the story was cruising along at 60mph and then hit the brick wall that is the end of the book. In this case, however, the lack of resolution chapter left me with pretty significant questions that I felt needed to be answered. And I don't usually mind open-ended books, but there's endings that are open ended because that's how life is and there are endings that are open-ended due to plot lines not getting tied up properly. And, to me, this novel falls into the latter category.

It is nearly impossible to explain further without giving spoilers, so I'm going to be as vague as possible and hopefully this makes sense. A few chapters from the end, there's a big event happens that shatters our main character's world and makes her start to question everything in her life. Then, in the final pages of the book, the main character states that event didn't happen like the reader thought it happened so it basically negates the main character's emotional growth. However, that statement was made during the final confrontation and could have very well been a lie to save the main character. If that was the case, then that's fine. But the issue is that it isn't made clear one way or the other so now, as the reader, I'm left wondering if our main character is having a sort of mid-life crisis or if everything is going to more or less go back to normal because the big event didn't really happen. Another issue was the very last line in the book - it implies that there was some sort of emotional arc in regards to a very specific part of the main character's past but the previous mentions of this part of the main character in the novel didn't seem that important. It seemed like the main character had pretty much gotten past that part of her life as much as she possibly could and accepted it. So I was confused as to why she chose to say those last words in the story and why Märgen chose to end the novel after those words. I guess they didn't hit as powerfully as the last words of a novel should and left me wondering if I was a big idiot and missed something when I was reading.

Probably the part I liked the most about this novel was the flashbacks to 1600s Boston and the puritans/witch trials. Of course, the book is called The Puritan so the reader knows these flashbacks will become relevant to the plot at some point, but it isn't clear at the beginning just how everything is connected. In fact, all the pieces don't fall together until the last 25% of the book so until that point, these flashbacks serve as mostly atmosphere building scenes. When everything is tied together at the end and the reader finds out what the trials in the 1600s have to do with the present day murders, it really pays off. That final puzzle piece falling into place was *chef kiss* perfection. Until that point, I wasn't really sure how I felt about these POV chapters because they seemed so disjointed from the present day murder investigation but now, looking back, they were probably my favorite parts of the whole novel.


A fantastically paced and structured detective thriller. Very atmospheric investigation with enough dark gruesome parts to satisfy fans of Mindhunter/Thomas Harris/Criminal Minds. Ending is a bit abrupt, but until that point, this is one of the best written detective thrillers I've read in a long time.

318 pages

Thanks to NetGalley for providing the ARC. This book was published September 3, 2020.

I stayed up waaaay too late finishing this but I just couldn't put it down!  A fast-paced thriller where we have Boston homicide detective Marti and her partner, Neil, searching for a serial killer dubbed the wing maker (so named due to the unusual and disturbing way he displays his victims).  It's creepy, at times horrifying, and with plenty of twists and turns to keep you going right up to the very last page.