The Roses of May

The Roses of May is a thriller by the American writer Dot Hutchison, published in 2017 and a companion to her novel The Butterfly Garden.

The book's unusual quality is that it begins after the rescue, with the survivors of the Garden and the agents who are responsible for them, and treats the adjustment to ordinary life as the substance rather than as an epilogue. Eddison, Hanoverian and Ramirez are given the investigation into the priest who leaves flowers with his victims, and their casework is set against the unglamorous reality of witness care, housing and the long wait for a trial. The other half of the novel belongs to Priya Sravasti, whose sister was one of those victims years earlier and whose mother has spent the intervening time moving them both to keep ahead of a killer who has never been caught. The novel also spends time with the mothers in the story, since both the agents and the surviving sister are dealing with women who have been told to be grateful and have not been asked what they want, and that second subject is what makes the book more than its premise. The combination of procedural and family history gives it the tension, since the reader knows the pattern the agents are looking for long before the family does.