With a detective-protagonist who has a troubling personal connection with the murders she’s trying to solve, and who could face an unimaginable loss if the killer remains free, this psychological thriller enthralls from the first pages. And the thrills of Swallowtail run deep, as the novel also explores the powers of myths and art, and everything that can be gained or lost when someone must fully confront the traumas of their past.
The protagonist of the novel is Samantha (Sam) Star, who decided to become a detective after she was abducted and nearly murdered twenty years before. At the time of the abduction, she’d been heading to a party with a close friend, Bridget McGann, who didn’t survive the killer’s attack. Because she’d been seriously injured, Sam’s only memories of the incident come to her in troubling flashbacks, but the flashbacks are fragmentary and inconclusive, and they seem to further traumatize her more than lead her any closer to identifying the murderer. Still, Sam becomes determined to track down the killer, joining the police force and eventually partnering with the detective who came to her rescue the night she was abducted.
Although Sam can’t remember the details of Bridget’s murder, certain features of the crime scene stand out, and they connect the killing to the murders of two other young women, which occurred shortly after Bridget’s: In each crime scene, butterflies were placed on the women’s bodies, leading the murderer to be called the “butterfly killer.” Also, the victims were rendered as female figures from Greek myths (Daphne, in Bridget’s case, and Leda Philomela, in the case of the other murders). To Sam, the Bridget-Daphne connection is especially disturbing, because Bridget was portrayed as Daphne in a painting made for a contest initiated by Sam’s painter/father, who taught art at a local college. He asked that competitors “take a myth and twist it” in their paintings. In response to this prompt, a young art student who was captivated by Bridget created the Bridget-as-Daphne painting, which won the contest. This, of course, raises the possibility that he might be the killer. But one of the joys of Swallowtail is that nothing about the sleuthing side of the novel is as straightforward as it might first appear–far from it, as noted later.
After Bridget’s murder, Sam begins receiving letters from the presumed killer, who describes his crime scenes as works of art inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Sam comes to realize that the murderer is seeking to silence women “the way they are silenced in the myths.” An artist herself, she is sensitive to the intersections between art, myth, and violence, and in time, she returns to an unfinished painting she’d made of the scene of her almost-murder, trying to see if any new insights or truths might emerge. Here and elsewhere, she tries to push back against the killer’s attempts to control women, and reality, through violence and his crime-scene “art”–a refreshing and welcome aspect of the novel.
The stakes heighten considerably for Sam when another young woman is murdered, her throat bearing a butterfly and her body artfully staged. This suggests that the butterfly killer could be at work again. Worse than this, for Sam: the victim is a member of the dance team that her daughter, Corinne, performs with. This raises the disturbing possibility that her daughter might also be a target.
As Sam’s fears suggest, this won’t be the last of the murders bearing the butterfly killer’s signature. As to whether the new killings are the work of a copycat, or of the original butterfly killer, the evidence points in multiple, often contradictory directions, leading Sam and her colleagues down several paths of investigation–some of them dead ends, others taking them ever deeper into the dark, intentionally convoluted rabbit hole that the killer has left behind. All this is to say that Swallowtail is an exceptionally absorbing mystery with plenty of twists and turns, in which virtually nothing is predictable. It is not an exaggeration to say that even the surprises contain surprises, making this novel an incredibly entertaining, white-knuckle read.
One of the most captivating aspects of Swallowtail is its exploration of what drives the darkest impulses in humans and how those most possessed of such impulses might influence, and perhaps even charm, others in the worst possible ways. In an especially troubling and compelling angle of the novel, Sam is forced to consider whether she herself has ever fallen under the spell of such dark forces, causing her to question everything she’d thought she knew about herself–and possibly putting her reputation, and career, at risk.
A final strength of Swallowtail is that its setting, the seaside city of Quincy, Massachusetts, feels like a significant character in the novel. The story takes us everywhere from local Dunkin’ shops and old-time dive bars, to remote hangouts for teens and troublemakers, to upscale, marina-side restaurants where you might be seated next to the city’s gentrifiers and power brokers. This range of locales gives us a sense of Quincy’s history, culture, socioeconomics, and aspirations, which connect with the characters’ pasts and their present realities, dreams, and ambitions.
In conclusion, Swallowtail is a riveting, emotionally and narratively complex novel, and it’s a pleasure to recommend it.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Psychological thrillers
￭ Mystery or crime novels with a strong sense of place, such as novels by Dennis Lehane
￭ Greek myths and mythology in general
￭ Stories about coping with trauma