Sins of the Bees
A Novel
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- £13.49
Publisher Description
LitHub/CrimeReads best new debut selection
Popsugar Book Club best new thrillers selection
Winner of the 2020 American Fiction Award for Thriller: Crime from American Book Fest
Sins of the Bees blends the majesty and mystery of Where the Crawdads Sing with the character explorations of The Girls to present the lives of two very different women and their tumultuous interactions with a dangerous doomsday cult.
Other than her bonsai trees, twenty-year-old arborist Silvania August Moonbeam Merigal is alone in the world. After first her mother dies and then her grandfather—the man who raised her and the last of her family—Silva suffers a sexual assault and becomes pregnant. Then, ready to end her own life, she discovers evidence of a long-lost artist grandmother, Isabelle.
Desperate to remake a family for herself, Silva leaves her island home on the Puget Sound and traces her grandmother’s path to first a hippie beekeeper named Nick Larkins, and then to a religious, anti-government, Y2K cult embedded deep in the wilds of Hells Canyon. Len Dietz is the charismatic leader of the Almost Paradise compound, a place full of violence and drama: impregnated child brides called the Twelve Maidens, an armed occupation of a visitor’s center, shot-up mountain sheep washing up along with a half-drowned dog, and men transporting weapons in the middle of the night.
As Isabelle paints portraits of Len Dietz and the Twelve Maidens ceremonially progressing toward their group marriage on the prophesized end of the world—January 1, 2000, the new millennium—Silva moves ever closer to finding her grandmother in Hells Canyon and finds herself drawn Nick, whose life is also irrevocably tied to Len Dietz.
As tensions erupt into violence, Silva, Isabelle, Nick, and the members of Almost Paradise find themselves disastrously entangled. And like the ancient bonsai struggling to navigate territories both new and old, Silva is forced to face both her own history of loss, and the history of loss she’s stepped into: ruinous stories of family that threaten to destroy them all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Silva Merigal, the 20-year-old heroine of Lampman's affecting, lyrical debut, is going through her late grandfather Eamon's effects on Washington State's Trawler Island, she discovers paintings of 12 pregnant teenage girls in an envelope postmarked Two Rivers, Idaho. A handwritten note suggests that the paintings were sent to Eamon for safekeeping by Eamon's runaway wife, Isabelle, the artist grandmother Silva has never met. Silva decides to drive to Two Rivers, where she hopes to find Isabelle, but instead encounters apocalyptic cult leader Len Dietz, who's collecting munitions for the end times while grooming child brides to birth his holy army. The texts of Isabelle's unsent letters to Eamon, filled with wistful love for him and grief over the fates of the girls she has been commissioned to paint by the female cult member who managed the brides' training, punctuate the twinned stories of Silva's search and her relationship with beekeeper Nick Larkin, an enemy of Len's, whose property near the cult's compound she winds up helping Nick look after. Though grounded in a mystery, the novel blossoms when it explores how the rhythms of nature add grace to human solitude. Only an incongruously happy ending mars this profound, stark tale of loss and longing across generations. Lampman is a writer to watch.
