The Butterfly Garden

The Butterfly Garden (2016) is the first of a quartet of novels by Dot Hutchison, all of which feature some of the same characters and much of the same troubling subject matter, including child abuse, kidnapping, murder, and the long-term effects of trauma. Known collectively as The Collector series, the books center around a fictional team of agents in the FBI’s Crimes Against Children unit, including Agents Victor Hanoverian, Brandon Eddison, and Mercedes Ramirez, whose investigations continue the first novel’s harrowing glimpse into the darkest recesses of human nature. 

The second novel of the series, Roses of May (2017), which picks up four months after the conclusion of The Butterfly Garden, deals partly with the surviving Butterflies and their struggles to adjust to the world outside the Garden. Most of its action revolves around a new serial killer, who dumps the mutilated bodies of his female victims in churches, surrounded by spring flowers (the murderer’s “calling card”). The Summer Children (2018), the series’s third book, ventures even further afield from Inara and the other Butterflies, focusing on a mysterious female vigilante who “rescues” abused children by removing them from their homes, after slaughtering the parents who have allegedly hurt them. The series’s fourth novel, The Vanishing Season (2019), touches on Agent Eddison’s haunted past, when a new series of kidnappings bear eerie similarities to the unsolved disappearance of Eddison’s little sister decades earlier.

Though alluding sporadically to the events of The Butterfly Garden, and exploring many of the same themes, Hutchison’s three follow-up novels are not sequels, in that they do not demand close familiarity with the series’s first book. Each one a stand-alone mystery/thriller, the follow-ups also define themselves by taking a distinctive point of view, mostly by centering on a different lead agent: Just as The Butterfly Garden largely drew from Agent Hanoverian’s perspective, Roses of May shifts its focus to the more volatile Agent Eddison, while The Summer Children follows Agent Mercedes Ramirez, who makes only brief appearances in the first book. The fourth and last book, The Vanishing Season, dramatizes the point of view of Agent Eliza Sterling, who first appears in the second novel. Thus, Hutchison gives each member of her Crimes Against Children team their own moment, deepening and humanizing their characters in the process. For instance, in Roses of May, Agent Brandon Eddison, notably strident and short-tempered in the first novel, reveals unsuspected resources of humor and compassion.

Hutchison has also sought to give each novel its own texture and style; for instance, Roses of May, with its deep dive into FBI forensics, hones more closely to a police procedural than a work of psychological horror. By The Vanishing Season, the series’s final novel, the CAC agents, whose cases have bound them ever closer as a team, share a camaraderie that is appreciably warm and jocular, almost sibling-like, compared to the earlier books. This might be Hutchison’s point: Grappling daily with the trauma, heartbreak, and wreckage of so many broken, abusive families, the agents have, with each other, created a loving family of their own. It seems a natural response and a strikingly hopeful coda for a series as dark as The Collector.