Book Review ~ The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchinson

Title The Butterfly Garden

Author Dot Hutchinson
Published 2016

Summary
Near an isolated mansion lies a beautiful garden.

In this garden grow luscious flowers, shady trees…and a collection of precious “butterflies”—young women who have been kidnapped and intricately tattooed to resemble their namesakes. Overseeing it all is the Gardener, a brutal, twisted man obsessed with capturing and preserving his lovely specimens.

When the garden is discovered, a survivor is brought in for questioning. FBI agents Victor Hanoverian and Brandon Eddison are tasked with piecing together one of the most stomach-churning cases of their careers. But the girl, known only as Maya, proves to be a puzzle herself.

As her story twists and turns, slowly shedding light on life in the Butterfly Garden, Maya reveals old grudges, new saviors, and horrific tales of a man who’d go to any length to hold beauty captive. But the more she shares, the more the agents have to wonder what she’s still hiding... 


Thoughts: 
I am not really sure where to start on this review. While I enjoyed the book and clearly read it within the weeks’ time that I had. Now sitting back and reflecting, I feel conflicted. The premise was great, and I loved the shifting of past and present in this story. It felt like we were going down memory lane with the main character Maya. What I didn’t quite wrap my head around was the “big twist” of what she was hiding. It wasn’t that big of a twist, if that makes sense? I won’t ruin it because the book focuses on what she is hiding to reveal it in the last chapter and made me scratch my head.

Now that being said, this book has really stuck with me as I keep picturing the girls with their tattoos and survival of the butterflies. It was interesting enough I was tempted to get the second in the series until I realized that the next book only focuses on the agents who have moved onto another weird case and not really on the aftermath of the butterflies. I may still check it out for the main reason that the story itself was interesting and literally sucked me in. I ended up finishing it up during the Superbowl, LOL, which is saying something. I mainly wanted to know how it ended, which is pretty good as we start off knowing how it ended.

The characters are well-drawn out for the reader, and the gardener himself was just described well enough that the reader was both creeped out and yet weirdly fascinated with him. I enjoyed that while it was POV of Maya we did get to see the other girls through her eyes and what she did to adjust and adapt to her horrible environment. The author did not downplay the horrors in the garden, and yet it was almost like a hazy glass that we were looking through, and I enjoyed that. All in all, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is wanting to read a good psychological thriller.