🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4.2/5 | Steam: 🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read You’ll Be Sorry yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
A family disappears one night when the power goes out and is never seen again. No bodies. No explanation. A dog wandering town with dried blood on its back. And then there’s the witch lore. This book had me one hundred percent convinced something paranormal was going on. Absolutely convinced. And then it said: nope. Just plain old human beings being absolutely horrifying to each other. Which, honestly? Might be worse.
Fair warning before we dive in — this one goes to some genuinely dark places. The historical content involving a sex ring, drugged women, and the killing of babies pushed well past my comfort zone and made me deeply uncomfortable. But the story is layered and impressive enough that it held a 4.2/5 for me.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
1998
It starts in 1998. The Dixon family is a summer family. They come to the Dixon house every year, this home has been in the family for hundreds of years, and this particular summer, a stray dog has been wandering town and they fall in love with it. It lives with them all summer. End of October, getting ready to leave. A big storm rolls in, lightning strikes a massive oak tree, and the power goes out. The Dixon family is never seen again.
The dog turns up the next day wandering town, dried blood on its back. The postmistress spots it and calls police. The officer who goes to the house finds everything just… wrong. No birds, no bees, no sound at all. Inside, a bloody trail of footprints, half-eaten food. And nothing and no one else.
Thirty Years Later — Mandy
This case haunts Chief Grady, Mandy’s father, until his dying day. He never solves it. He passes away never knowing what happened, and less than a year later Mandy’s mom follows. Eventually Mandy joins the police force herself and becomes chief.
Present day. The Dixon house has been sitting on the market for years. Nobody wants it. Then suddenly it sells. Mandy goes to meet the new owners, Theo and Raquel Collins, because what kind of couple looks at a house with an unsolved family disappearance attached to it and says great, B&B potential? She goes to introduce herself. They have a lot of questions about the case, and the way they ask those questions sets Mandy’s instincts off immediately. This feels more personal than curious new homeowners.
Betty, Mandy’s surrogate mom who was close friends with both her parents, tells Mandy something she never knew: her father always believed the bloody footprints in the Dixon house were planted. Too consistent. Too evenly spaced throughout the entire house. Not natural.
Something Feels Wrong
That night, Raquel can’t sleep and wanders the house finding murals, and graffiti in the bedrooms. Something comes over her — a flash, a voice: “Mommy, I’m scared. Close your eyes.” She goes back to bed, unsettled.
Next morning, Theo announces they have a dog. Just showed up. Nobody’s missing a dog. No animal rescue has any record of a lost one. And the Dixon family dog was never found after 1998. Now a new family moves into the Dixon house… and a dog appears.
The DNA Problem
Because the house sold, the old case gets new forensic attention. They retest the original DNA from the crime scene — previously ruled inconclusive, only one blood type detected. Now: three different donors. They can only match one to a name. Ian Grady. Mandy’s father. The former chief. Detective Adams is convinced that Mandy’s dad was one of the intruders the night the Dixons disappeared. That is a devastating thing for Mandy to sit with — but she truly doesn’t believe he could have had something to do with their murders and then spent the rest of his life pretending to be obsessed with solving the case.
The 1790 Journal Entries
Woven through the book are journal entries from 1790 — a woman staying at the Dixon property writing about Samuel Dixon and his wife, writing that she thinks she may have found a home at last. The book also keeps interrupting with a strange, seemingly angry voice going on about epigenetics and inherited memories. It’s doing something. Hang in there.
Raquel’s Truth Starts Coming Out
What we learn about Raquel, gradually: she has had multiple miscarriages. The first two very early. The third far enough along that she had a stillborn. Then one day, deep in grief, she finds a locket with a photo of a woman holding her dead baby. On the back: a date and the name Hannah Dixon. That’s how she found this house. She researched the Dixon property obsessively — deeds, old documents, land sketches. A smudge where the well should be. That’s what brought her here.
Theo’s mother, suspicious from the start, hired an investigator. Results: great credit, no record — and a Raquel Collins who does not exist before age eighteen. New identity. She also owns a rundown cabin she never told Theo about, which she explains away as a family legacy property. Theo presses her: she wasn’t born with this name, was she? She admits it. He tells her she talks in her sleep. That she says she “just has to kill her first.” She brushes it off. Theo knows there is a version of her she hasn’t shared with him yet. He loves her anyway. Theo is a real MVP in this book.
The Dog Finds Something
Mr. Mann — the dog they’ve named, taken to the vet, settled in — can’t be found one evening. They track him to the backyard: freshly washed and already filthy again, digging like his life depends on it. He uncovers some rotting wood planks. Theo moves them aside and finds an old sealed well. He goes down to investigate. They call Chief Grady.
The coroner confirms: the remains of a young woman at the bottom of that well. She was thrown in alive with some sort of pottery or crockery. She lived long enough to claw at the wood trying to get herself out — scratch marks all over it. Based on how the well is sealed, it is estimated to be over two hundred years old. This is not the Dixon family that is still missing. Raquel searches every map she can find for the old well. Nothing. Not one record of it — like someone went through and rubbed it out, both from the real world and from every map they could get their hands on.
What Was in the Pottery
Inside the well, sitting in the middle of the floor, is a round piece of old crockery. They bring it to the station and open it. Inside: a historic treatment ledger. Midwife Ruth. Entries from 1790 to 1791. And at the very bottom: fragments of something. Raquel looks at those fragments and immediately says they are infant bones. She doesn’t know how she knows. She just does.
Betty, the Handwriting, and Five Dead Babies
Betty goes through the ledger and stops. She recognizes the handwriting — it’s very distinctive. She goes away and comes back with a personal diary she had found, and the handwriting is the same. More personal than the ledger — details about this woman’s daily life, even weather entries.
Betty remembers: this ledger was once dropped off at the local library. The library passed it to the historical society. They tried to find out who dropped it off. Couldn’t. And then a page falls out — a note tucked inside: “Please contact the Dixon family.” It had been dropped off around the time the Dixons went missing.
Going through the ledger and diary together: dates babies were born, dates they died. Five entries with a baby born and dead the next day. None of those deaths recorded anywhere official. Five deceased infants in five months.
Theo notices the last few diary entries have unusual amounts of white space. He takes the book to the fireplace and holds the pages close to the heat. Hidden sentences start appearing. Invisible ink, revealed by warmth.
The Witch of the Woods
A local busybody mentions Isla McLean to Mandy — a recluse who lives alone in the woods. The townspeople call her the witch. Her current dog is Lovey 3. There have been two before him, and Lovey 1 was around during the Dixon days.
When Mandy visits, Isla admits she knew the Dixon children. She mourns them visibly. She was the one who painted the murals in the kids’ rooms. Isla and Chief Grady were “friends of a sort,” she says. He used to visit her too.
The Midwife’s Story
Betty gathers the group and tells them what she knows from local folklore: a woman appeared in town one day — no jacket, just asked for a drink of water. The townspeople, the men especially, convinced her to stay. She worked as a midwife in exchange for room and board. One by one, babies started dying. The town turned on her. They demanded she confess to witchcraft. She refused. They dragged her to a frozen pond, weighed her down — their logic being that a god-fearing woman would be saved. As they threw her in, she told them they would lose a child every winter. To remind them of their ways.
Someone Wants That Journal
The next morning Raquel lets Mr. Mann out and a shadowy figure rushes past her into the house, grabs the journal, and makes for the door. She blocks them long enough that they shove the journal aside to escape, hop on a quad, and take off. Raquel and Mandy give chase. They lose him, but at the edge of the woods, they find bones. And a cave.
In a flashback: the youngest Dixon boy, Henry, once invited Isla to their secret pirate cave hideout. She’d wandered those woods her whole life and never found anything like it. The moment she stepped inside she was overtaken by dread. Something terrible happened there. She knows it in her body, in her blood — epigenetics.
When Mandy and Austin go into the cave: they only find five skulls. The Dixon family had six members. What happened? Is this even them?
Raquel Is Bunny Borden
This comes out slowly, in flashbacks and then in a confrontation with Betty.
Raquel’s story: her mother was making her younger siblings Charlie and Lily chronically ill — Munchausen by proxy. Always at the hospital. Always fundraising. Charlie gaunt and getting worse. Lily always sick and getting sicker. One day Raquel went looking for a blanket in her mother’s closet and found four shoeboxes of infant bones. She did the math: if her mother could dispose of her own babies that easily, what was stopping her from eventually doing the same to Raquel, Charlie, and Lily?
Raquel killed her mother with an axe while she slept. But she was too late for her siblings.
The state sent her to a mental health facility rather than prison. With four confirmed dead children, the state agreed her actions were contextually understandable. Raquel describes her time there as a therapeutic environment where she had “some things to unpack.” I mean. She did.
Her real name is Bunny, later called Bunny Borden — a nod to Lizzy Borden given the axe. Betty eventually makes the connection between Bunny and the infant bones and asks Raquel directly: is it true, what they found in the four shoeboxes? That’s how Raquel knew immediately what those pottery fragments were. Her mother had the same thing in her closet. Betty figures this out, and it is ultimately what helps Mandy crack the ongoing theme of the “witch in the well” riddle. It’s about the babies.
Theo goes through the journal and finds something odd. Extra space. He takes it to the fireplace again. The heat-revealed entry describes the fifth mother to come to Ruth the midwife begging her to take the baby away — she believes it is a child of Satan.
Mandy Confronts Betty — Mason Arrives
Mandy arrives and demands Betty tell her what happened to the Dixon family thirty years ago. Betty is appalled Mandy thinks she hurt them. Mandy cuts through it, calls Mason, tells him to get to the Collins house.
Betty confirms to Mandy who Bunny is — and that’s how Mandy finally cracks the riddle of the witch in the well. Who’s really down there is Ruth the midwife, killed by the Dixon ancestors.
Mason arrives. He tells them about a legend of lost treasure on the property going back to the early 1700s. Then Mason tells them something else: he knew Janet Dixon had found the planted journal. He asked her for it three times. She refused all three. After the third rebuff, as president of the historical society, he decided to just go get it himself. He broke into the house the morning after the storm, took off his shoes so as not to make noise, cut his foot, and contaminated the entire crime scene with his blood. Never said a word about it. He never found the journal. That explains one of the suspicious footprint sets — Mason’s bloody foot, the morning after. But there were two sets. Where did the second come from?
Detective Adams Is a Dixon
Isla had walked Adams back to her cabin when he got sick at the crime scene. At her place, he says he knows this place — he has been here before. She doesn’t answer. He tells her he knows his birth parents aren’t his real birth parents. She tells him: the first time they met, he came to her looking for a witch. He is the youngest Dixon boy. William.
What Isla saw that night: the Dixon dog came to her cabin, frantic. She followed it back to the house and found Steve Dixon lying over the body of his dead daughter, Janet sprawled near another daughter, and then the last two boys. And then she heard William moan. He was alive.
She made a decision. If whoever did this found out one of the Dixons survived, they would come back for him. So she hid William and then moved every body overnight — to the cave. Five skulls, because William wasn’t dead. She went back and planted a second set of footprints through the house to confuse the killer. She took William and the dog to her mother’s after he recuperated, and her mother helped find his adoptive parents. Then Isla isolated herself for thirty years, terrified that if she ever slipped and said something, she’d put William in danger.
William had no memory of that night. No memory of this town. No memory of Isla. He became a detective. He came back as an adult to work a cold case that turned out to be his own family’s disappearance. Detective Adams.
He demands she tell him what happened. She says she saw what happened — but not who did it.
What Actually Happened in 1790
The hidden writing in the diary fills in the rest. Men in this town were drugging women and taking them to the cave to rape them in groups. When those women eventually gave birth, they had fragmented memories — fire, men, things they couldn’t make sense of — and believed their babies were children of Satan. The men used this to explain away the pregnancies. And then they killed the infants to cover their tracks. Possibly with some of the husbands’ knowledge. Samuel Dixon was almost certainly in on it. When Ruth made clear in her final ledger entry that she intended to speak to him directly about what she knew, he accused her of witchcraft. The village dragged her to the frozen pond, weighed her down, and when she didn’t miraculously survive, threw her in the old well on the Dixon property. The woman who clawed at the wood trying to get out. That was Ruth.
But only four of those five documented infants actually died. Ruth had secretly saved one — spirited it away. That baby is Isla’s ancestor. The cave’s history lives in Isla’s blood. Which is why she always had that feeling about it she could never explain.
Isla Orchestrated All of This
Mandy lays it out to Isla: you trained Mr. Mann to find that well. You planted the journal for Janet to find. You set all of this in motion. Isla confirms she gave the journal to Janet Dixon hoping Janet would spread the truth — but she had no idea what was about to happen to the Dixon family. “I never anticipated it would take over thirty years to find who killed that family.”
And here is where Mandy has an epiphany: Isla saw the bloody footprint in the house at dawn. But Mason told them he was there the morning after the storm. Isla can place him there much earlier than that. Mason was lying about his timeline.
Austin Comes Forward
At a town meeting, local firefighter Austin shows up drunk. Twenty years of sobriety, gone. He’s telling anyone who will listen about that night — he thought he hit a deer with his car. Then what he thought were bears came at him in the dark. He fired. Four bullets. He hit one of the Dixon children with his car, and then the family came running in the dark toward him screaming and he fired in a panic.
What Mason Actually Did
Mason eventually confesses to all of it. He had been at the Dixon property the night the family disappeared — waiting, trying to figure out where the cave was. He saw the lightning strike the oak tree and the entire family run out of the house. He went inside to find the journal. Couldn’t find it. Then he saw Dave Dixon running toward him through the dark, carrying a child in his arms.
That child was the one Austin had hit with his car.
Dave Dixon was running toward Mason screaming for help, asking someone to please help his injured child. Mason panicked. He shot Dave in the head. Then the other children came running and screaming, and Mason shot them all. In for a penny, in for a pound. He went home and listened to his police scanner. The next day: not dead. Missing. Because Isla had moved the bodies. Mason convinced himself it must have been a fever dream. Surely he wasn’t the type of person who could kill an entire family.
He was. He did.
One of the children was killed by a shot from Austin’s gun — not Mason’s. Austin did not walk away from this clean. Mason’s biggest grievance at the end of all of this? He was taken down by a dog. And he never found the treasure.
The Cave Showdown
Theo and Raquel go to the cave to try to find where the treasure is hidden, but they realize they don’t have anything to dig with. A voice in the dark says: “Don’t worry, I brought a shovel.” Theo gets hit with the shovel. A gun goes off. Raquel comes to in the cave, bleeding. Theo wakes up and they see it’s Mason. She grabs a lantern and tosses it to Theo — he smashes Mason over the head with it. Adams appears and helps get them out. Then more shots. Adams takes one to the stomach. Raquel passes out. She wakes up in a snowstorm with Theo carrying her. He collapses in the snow.
Mandy finds Adams on the ground telling her not to worry about him — Mason went after Theo and Raquel. He says all he needs to do is crawl a few more feet and he can die with his family. Mandy stuffs snow into the wound and wraps him in her scarf, then goes after the others.
Mr. Mann attacks Mason and wins.
The Resolution
Raquel gets emergency surgery and pulls through. Detective Adams, William Dixon, tells the police everything he knows and takes extended leave. Isla faces criminal charges for concealing bodies for thirty years. Mason is in custody.
Mandy visits Isla. The treasure: Isla had already found it. She finished digging it up and then destroyed all of it — burned the notes. This town was founded on greed and corruption. She didn’t want any of it back in the world.
Mandy is still left with the question of her father’s DNA at the original crime scene. It turns out that was Isla — she had bandaged up Mandy’s dad the night before, kept the bloody gauze, soaked it in saline and used it to obscure the bloody footprints. A way of muddying the scene to protect William. It’s messy and not totally clear what it accomplished, but it answers the question about the DNA.
Best Part of This Book
The bait-and-switch. The entire setup — missing family, eerie silence, the dog, the witch legend — screams paranormal, supernatural. The book commits to that feeling long enough to genuinely have you. And then the pivot: people are the real horror here. That is a hard thing to pull off and this one does it.
Worst Part of This Book
The historical sex ring content. The drugged women, the raped wives, the babies killed to cover up what those men did — it is significant to the plot, not a footnote, and it is not glossed over. It pushed well outside my comfort zone. If that subject is something you need to avoid, know that it is a central part of this story.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 / 5 — Zero steam. Zero romance. Strict cold case mystery territory. Content warnings for this one are serious: sexual assault (historical, 1790 plotline), infanticide, Munchausen by proxy and child abuse, murder, violence. If those subjects are ones you need to avoid, go in knowing they are present and significant to this story.
The Ending Explained— Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied. The big question gets answered. Mason killed the Dixon family. Isla protected the one who survived for thirty years. William Dixon has been walking around as Detective Adams with no memory of who he actually is. That is a lot for one book to pull off, and this one does. The loose thread around Mandy’s father sits with you the way it’s supposed to.
What Really Happened to the Dixon Family?
They were all killed. Austin the fire chief hit one with a car and shot one in his drunken panic. Mason the historian killed the rest of them when he was found inside their house. Isla moved the bodies and protected the one survivor — William, who became Detective Adams — for thirty years.
Would I Reread It?
Once. Just once — I know I missed things and I want to go back through knowing the ending and catch what I walked right past the first time. The kind of read where the second time is a completely different experience.
Who Is This For
Readers who love layered cold case mysteries with a deep historical subplot. If the setup-that-screams-paranormal-but-isn’t is your kind of twist — this is your book. Just know the content is dark and go in prepared.
Where to Get This Book
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