This Tartan Horror/Mystery had me creeped out in the middle of the night! And yet, I couldn’t put it down, spine shivers be damned!

The novel revolves around a murder of a young girl and the mystery of her gruesome death, as seen through the eyes of the local constable who is investigating it, Angus. But this policeman is extraordinarily gifted with paranormal (in)sight, a legacy of his own haunted past. What results is a deeply engrossing whodunit woven through with Gaelic history and culture. For readers who enjoy hints of the demonic, pagan, and ancient evils, The Unforgiven Dead will have you prancing a ritual dance. For readers who love a twisted murder mystery, one in which the murderer is hidden in plain sight alá Agatha Christie, The Unforgiven Dead will absolutely make you squeal once the culprit is exposed.

But the story alone is not the novel’s only draw. The characters of this novel are deftly crafted, their dialogue mimics life, their motivations are raw and human and utterly flawed. For readers of literary fiction, the trials of Angus, Nadia, Gills, and Ashleigh will rent your heart. Their lives mimic reality and their hurts are ones we are likely to relate to, if we don’t know them well already.

The Unforgiven Dead leaves me pining for a moody, grey Scotland more than I could have imagined.

A profoundly moving novel, with a story so powerful as to cause me to pause every few pages to wipe away tears. Mercy packs an emotional punch along the lines of Tinker by Paul Harding or Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. This is an impressive debut novel, one well-worth the grief and tears it is sure to evoke.

The novel revolves around Sadie, a twelve-year old girl abandoned by her parents and her subsequent landing on her Uncle Charlie’s farm in South Dakota. Mercy is both what she finds and what she delivers to those in her life, whether they are deserving of forgiveness or not. This is literary fiction at its best: raw and rich characters; humanity at its flawed worst and inspiring best.

Patrick is an excellent writer; her prose is evocative and succinct, creating an affect that strikes the reader deep in the gut with very few words. In the space of 154 pages, Patrick immerses the reader in Sadie’s juvenile, but deeply adult and complicated world. The reader follows Sadie’s journey as she navigates the traumatic events of her abandonment, her memories of the past, her fears for her future. Patrick very successfully channels the emotions of a 12-year old, whilst balancing the very mature context of her circumstances; this is not a novel for a teenaged audience necessarily, its themes cross age-oriented literary boundaries.

The novel could use a professional editing, as there are some inaccuracies in turns of phrase; “Martha could have cared less” on page 23 for example. Indeed, it appears that Martha could not possibly have cared any less. [Some of the lack of professional editing may be due to the novel being independently published.] Still, despite the occasional typographic error, Mercy remains irresistible. I read it in an afternoon, I could not put it down.

I encountered this book via a Facebook Group, in which I serve as a reviewer for ARCs and independently published novels. I have previously read and reviewed another of Patrick’s books here, Anxiety in the Wilderness: Stories. If you are interested in Patrick’s work, please see her Amazon author page here. You may purchase Mercy there, currently priced at $9.99 for a paperback, $15.99 for a hardback, and $2.99 for the Kindle ebook format.