"Attorney Howes’ debut legal procedural wrestles with guilt and responsibility, as seen in the case of a woman charged with killing her newborn infant. The central question author Howes explores throughout is who was to blame for the infant’s death—the accused woman or the hypercoercive cult to which she belonged.

The novel shuttles between past and present in two narratives: that of the accused, Heather Garner, and that of Abby Harris, the criminal defense attorney hired by Heather’s long-estranged family. Heather’s sometimes overly detailed first-person account starts in 1996, when drugs derailed her college career, and members of a cult called The Messiah’s Tribes befriended her.

Defense attorney Harris’ account is a more distanced third-person view, which gives a nice balance to the novel. Readers will learn a great deal about how cults operate as they witness both Heather’s point of view and Abby’s investigations into The Tribes and her courtroom arguments about the cult’s hold on its members."

Connie Fletcher

Booklist