FBI special agent Mercy Kilpatrick has been waiting her whole life for disaster to strike. A prepper since childhood, Mercy grew up living off the land — and off the grid — in rural Eagle’s Nest, Oregon. Until a shocking tragedy tore her family apart and forced her to leave home. Now a predator known as the cave man is targeting the survivalists in her hometown, murdering them in their homes, stealing huge numbers of weapons, and creating federal suspicion of a possible domestic terrorism event. But the crime scene details are eerily familiar to an unsolved mystery from Mercy’s past.

Sent by the FBI to assist local law enforcement, Mercy returns to Eagle’s Nest to face the family who shunned her while maintaining the facade of a law-abiding citizen. There, she meets police chief Truman Daly, whose uncle was the cave man’s latest victim. He sees the survivalist side of her that she desperately tries to hide, but if she lets him get close enough to learn her secret, she might not survive the fallout….

IN A NUTSHELL
‘A Merciful Death’ was solid entertainment. A well-told story with prose that lubricated the plot and main characters with strong roots in Oregon’s Prepper culture. .I enjoyed the simple but skilful storytelling and the believable dialogue. Most of all, I liked meeting Mercy Kilpatrick. It was refreshing to meet a skilled FBI agent who was more than a brain, a badge and a dark suit. Mercy’s background, her secrets, her fraught relationship with her family, and her private obsessions, made the novel much more engaging.

I’m a latecomer to the Mercy Kilpatrick series, that ‘A Merciful Death‘ back in 2017 but I’m about to become an ardent fan.

I knew from the opening pages that this book was going to be like a good meal: something I could relax into, enjoy and be satisfied and content at the end. Kendra Elliot’s simple but skilful storytelling drew me in, managing the story set-up without clunky info dumps or clichéd descriptions of people. Instead, she offered me believable dialogue, engaging characters and a murder mystry wrapped around Oregon’s Prepper culture. Best of all, she introduced me to Mercy Kilpatrick, who immediaetely piqued my curiosity, She wasn’t just another FBI suit nor was she an obvious eccentric or rebel. She was someone with strongly grounded, slightly off-centre beliefs who was embracing her FBI role without letting go of her identity. As soon as I met her, I knew I’d enjoy learning about her history and motivations as much as watching her unravel the murder mystery.

It turned out that Mercy’s past and the current murders were closely but obscurely linked, The novel worked as a police procedural mystery but that was just the substrate for the story of who Mercy Kilpatrick is, why she has been estranged from her family for fifteen years and how she will deal with returning to her home town as an FBI agent charged with solving the murders of solitary old men who were part of the Prepper community that she was raised in.

The murder mystery had enough plot twists to keep me engaged but what kept me keen to return to the book whenever I set it down were some of the twists in how Mercy’s story was told.

I liked that the local sherrif turns out to be more of an outsider than Mercy was, even though she’d been away for fifteen years. Mercy’s roots are in the town and although she now works for the Federal Government, her worldview has been shaped by the Prepper culture that is alien to the Sheriff. This twist was a great way of managing plot exposition, giving cultural context and doing character development at the same time.

I liked the way Mercy’s relationship with her siblings and her parents was drawn. It gave Mercy depth and made her more than a plot device for solving the mystery. Kendra Elliot kept me in suspense for a long time about the nature of the incident that led to Mercy leaving her home behind while still a teenager and I wondered whether, after all that build-up, the reveal would be worth it. It was. It changed both my understanding of the murder mystery plot and of how Mercy came to be who she is.

Sometimes, when a book is working well I get so wrapped up in it that I stop thinking about why it’s working. The thing I didn’t notice about ‘A Merciful Death’ while I was reading it was how well-structured the story is. The plot exposition, the character development and the social context are carefully choreographed to sustain engagement and heighten tension.

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Teri Schnaubelt, who did a great job of bringing the characters to life.

There are six more audiobooks already available in the Mercy Kilpatrick series. I’ve downloaded the next one, ‘A Merciful Truth’ to read next month.