Miranda Crabtree is a young girl who lives with her father in the Arkansas bayou. They ferry a witch named Iskra around and she performs midwifery duties for local people. One day the witch performs such services for a dictatorial preacher, Billy Cotton, who leads his flock like a cult. Cotton’s wife gives birth to a deformed child with webbed feet and has died in childbirth. When Cotton tries to kill the child, Iskra saves him and they take the child to a mysterious island. Here Iskra and Miranda’s father take the child into the woods and when Miranda follows, she finds the child but not her father, who has been killed.
Miranda raises the child on her own and ten years later is employed running dope by Cotton and a corrupt cop, Charlie Riddle. But Cotton’s flock has deserted him and he’s dying of cancer. He’s addled by the guilt of his wife dying in childbirth and needs a sacrifice. So, one day, Miranda arrives to pick up dope but the traffickers have something very different: a young girl. She refuses and takes the girl home, even though she knows that Cotton and Riddle will come looking for her, and when they do, Cotton might discover that his son is in fact not dead.
The Boatman’s Daughter is a fantastic novel that pulses with atmosphere and a slice of Southern Gothic that masterfully mixes horror with crime fiction. This is a book that seamlessly blends magic and mythology and blood sacrifice with corruption and the evil that men do. The bayou the author conjures is both a brutal and beautiful landscape, populated by (mostly) brutal people. This is a place far out of the reach of the authorities, and those that are present are corrupt and dangerous, as Charlie Riddle – who along with the other authority figure, Billy Cotton, is one of the major antagonists are testament.
This is the author’s second novel and the first book of his that I’ve read. It won’t be my last as this is highly recommended.
4 out of 5 stars
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