A mystery that unpacks the skeletons in the family closet, one bone at a time.
We spend so much time in thrillers trying to find out who did it. The real question, the one No Rest for the Wicked forces you to ask, is whether you can ever truly know the people who made you.
No Rest for the Wicked Review: Why Rachel Louise Adams’s Debut Demands Your Attention
There’s a specific kind of dread tied to returning to a place that knew you before you knew yourself. You walk the same sidewalks, but the ground feels different under your feet. Unstable. That’s the sensation Rachel Louise Adams captures with an almost unbearable precision in her debut, No Rest for the Wicked. It’s not just the goosebumps of a good scare; it’s the deeper, more personal horror of realising the monster under your bed might share your last name.
Adams introduces us to Dolores Hawthorne, a forensic pathologist who has spent 18 years building a life in Los Angeles, deliberately void of her Midwestern roots. She counts the bones of her skull to ground herself, a clinical tic that speaks volumes about her need for order in the face of emotional chaos.
When the FBI calls about her missing father, a former US senator with a troubled legacy, she has no choice but to fly back to Little Horton, Wisconsin. The town, we quickly learn, is a place that wears its spooky-season obsession like a second skin. Jack-o’-lanterns grin from every porch, pumpkin spice hangs heavy in the air, and the local theatre runs slashers year-round. It’s a tourist trap for gore-hounds, but for Dolores, it’s just a trap.
Reading this prose is like watching a crime scene photographer at work. Adams has a clinical eye for detail, a steady hand that doesn’t flinch, but she always finds the heartbreaking humanity in the frame. The writing is direct, unafraid to be sharp, but it bleeds with a melancholic warmth for its broken protagonist.
Dolores is the anchor here, and she’s a rare find in thriller fiction. Too often, characters with trauma are defined solely by it. Dolores’s past is a wound, yes, but it’s one that has healed into a scar that occasionally pulls tight. She’s competent, almost to a fault. Watching her navigate the autopsy suite is to watch someone in total command. But put her in a room with her chilly stepmother or the half-siblings who see her as a deserter, and that command crumbles into a quiet, desperate awkwardness. She’s brilliant with the dead and utterly lost among the living. That contrast is the engine of the book.
The mystery itself is a clever piece of architecture. It’s not just about a missing politician. It’s about a missing memory. Dolores’s past is a series of locked doors, and the investigation into her father’s disappearance becomes a battering ram. Adams seamlessly weaves the procedural elements with Dolores’s fractured flashbacks. The pacing is a slow burn, but it’s the good kind. The kind where the heat builds so gradually you don’t realise you’re sweating until the fire finally catches.
I will say, I went into this expecting a more overt supernatural element. The marketing leans hard on the Halloween setting, and my brain immediately went to something more folk-horror. That’s not what this is. The horror here is entirely human. It’s the horror of a family dinner where every glance is a grenade.
The horror of a town’s cheerful embrace of violence as entertainment. The horror of a memory that refuses to stay buried. For readers looking for ghosts and goblins, that might be a point of frustration. For me, it made the chills last longer. You can close a book on a ghost. It’s harder to close the book on the idea that someone you loved could harbour such darkness.
Speaking of the town, Little Horton is a character in its own right. Adams, who grew up in France with a North American mother, mentioned in an interview that she plays the “What if?” game when building her settings. What if a town’s entire identity was wrapped up in a holiday about fear and masks? It’s a brilliant metaphor for the Hawthorne family, who have been wearing masks for decades. The town’s gaudy celebration of death stands in stark, ironic contrast to the very real, very secret deaths that have poisoned its soil.
What Adams does exceptionally well is subvert the “homecoming” trope. This isn’t a story about reconnecting with your roots; it’s about severing them with a bloody Halloween hatchet. Dolores doesn’t want to heal her family; she wants to survive them. This psychological realism elevates the book above the standard thriller fare. It shares a shelf with the likes of Tana French, where the landscape and the psyche are inextricably linked, and the mystery is just the surface of a much deeper well of emotional truth.
The plot veers in directions you don’t expect, not through cheap tricks, but through a careful unfolding of character. Just when you think you’ve pegged someone as a villain, Adams gives you a glimpse of their own scars. The final reveal landed with a sickening thud of recognition for me. I hadn’t fully guessed it, but in hindsight, the clues were all there, hidden in plain sight, obscured by the very humanity of the characters.
And because this is a debut, it’s impossible not to wonder where Adams goes from here. She has the bones of a future powerhouse. Her background in horror writing shows in the controlled dread. She’s not throwing blood at the wall; she’s letting it drip, letting it pool. It’s a confidence you usually see in writers on their third or fourth book. If this is her starting point, the trajectory is exciting to consider.
We spend so much time in thrillers trying to find out who did it. The real question, the one No Rest for the Wicked forces you to ask, is whether you can ever truly know the people who made you.
No Rest for the Wicked by Rachel Louise Adams
A dark, suspenseful thriller with pitch-black humour, in which a series of grisly murders in the week of 31 October take place in the ‘Halloween town’ of Little Horton – a community famed throughout the Midwest for celebrating the festival with gusto. Perfect for fans of Ronald Malfi and Rachel Harrison.
In one Halloween obsessed Midwestern town, everyone’s on red alert after a local politician goes missing. Little do they know it’s only the beginning.
It’s been close to twenty years since forensic pathologist Dolores Hawthorne left her hometown of Little Horton, Wisconsin. The town is famous for its Halloween celebrations, but also its history of violent deaths linked to the holiday. To Dolores, it’s the place she fled, family, bad memories, and all. Until the FBI calls to tell her that her father–the former mayor turned US Senator–is missing under mysterious circumstances.
Some people count to ten to wake up from a nightmare. Dolores always counts the bones of her head instead: sphenoid, frontal, lacrimal. But no matter how many times she counts them, it doesn’t change the fact that her father is missing, that his final words of warning to her were to trust no one, and that now, the rest of her family is giving Dolores a chilling welcome. With Halloween fast approaching, Dolores must face the past she left behind before it’s too late.
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