Minotaur
Published August 11, 2026
Reviewed by Mary-Jane Oltarzewski
Annie Gore has seen plenty since leaving her hometown in rural Kentucky for a stint as a special investigator in the Air Force, followed by her current job as a private eye, but she’s still taken by surprise when a new client asks, “’Have you ever been to a snake-handling church?’” In Brimstone Hollow, Archer Sullivan’s second novel to feature the smart, resourceful detective, Annie explains that she’s never been to one, but where she’s from, everyone has heard of the “fervent fire-and … brimstone sermons delivered by preachers who shake snakes around during services as sort of proof of faith.”
The new client, Katie May, is the long-estranged daughter of one such preacher: the charismatic, velvet-voiced Ezra King, who died after a fatal encounter with one of his snakes. There was no autopsy, a quick burial, and Katie’s been having disturbing dreams, or maybe visions. She can’t shake the idea that perhaps her father’s death was not accidental, and begs for help in learning more about what happened to him. Annie’s initial skepticism is overcome by her empathy for this fatherless daughter; she agrees to leave the big city of Louisville and head up to Mt. Zion, the tiny, remote town in the Appalachians where the preacher lived and died.
It’s a little place where everyone seems to have a big secret. Gossip and rumors abound: some stories are decades old, some recent tales involve Ezra King, and more than a few involve Annie herself. Her investigation has barely begun when she narrowly escapes a crash that almost totals her beautiful vintage muscle car; it turns out the brakes have been tampered with. Ezra’s was the first, but will not be the last suspicious death in Mt. Zion over the course of the week in this fast-paced, dynamic story. The circumstances become as tangled, and as dangerous, as a nest of vipers as she seeks to understand how all these deaths and secrets are related.
The mountains and hollows, even the steamy, late-spring climate surrounding Mt. Zion, are equal parts beautiful and threatening, and Annie’s memories of her past, in a town similar to this one, are both an asset and a burden to her investigation. It’s a community steeped in faith and superstition, and some of her own ghosts return to haunt her, as hard as she works to uncover the unsettling truths that exist in the here and now. Eventually she comes to see how demons as old as the land and sky are tied to chillingly modern concerns, leading her to justice, and a melancholic sense of clarity, for her client, herself, and the little community that has had so much impact on them.