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.