The Body Next Door (spoilers) | Maia Chance

Dead bodies, buried secrets, old artifacts, whispers of witchcraft, a mysterious violinist and an apocalyptic cult… You won’t want to skip this book! If you’re looking for a spoiler-free review, head to the main review.

An historic northeast coastal island with a small crew of locals, a scandalous history, and a now-defunct cult are at the center of The Body Next Door. The book is initiated by the discovery of a body at the site of an excavation. We don’t find out whose body it is or what it means for some time, but Hannah McCollough certainly seems to have suspicions about that body.

What is The Body Next Door about?

Hannah McCollough’s life is far from perfect, but you’d never know it by looking at her. Instead, you’d see a beautiful young mother wholly devoted to her two children and a docile wife utterly besotted with her self-made millionaire husband, Allan. You wouldn’t see the dark secret she carries.

But when a construction crew unearths the body of a young girl near the McCulloughs’ vacation home on Orcas Island, Hannah has no choice but to confront her past. She wonders how much Allan knows about the victim and the apocalyptic cult she was connected to. Meanwhile, Allan can’t seem to understand why his beautiful young bride, as polished and pristine as the collectible artifacts in his glass case, would threaten their fairy-tale lifestyle by digging too deep, in places she knows she shouldn’t.

As the police investigation into the gruesome discovery deepens, the facade of Hannah’s picture-perfect marriage starts to crumble, and she soon finds herself on a dire hunt for answers. And Hannah’s search takes an unexpected turn after she crosses paths with three strangers with shocking secrets of their own.

Who are the main characters?

The book is told though multiple narrators: Hannah, her husband Allan, a boy who goes by Greene, a violinist named Josh, and a local woman named Caroline. I found the multiple narrators hard to keep track of at the beginning, especially since it wasn’t clear how they all tied together. They seemed like separate stories, with the obvious exception of Allan and Hannah. Each time one character entered another’s storyline, I was giddy. Each was another piece of the puzzle that was this book and what exactly was happening with the body (next door).

What’s the story with Hannah and Allan?

Hannah and Allan are married (obviously), but Hannah’s two children are not biologically his. Interesting! Seems uncommon for a misogynistic millionaire like Allan, doesn’t it? Hannah’s son was already born and she was pregnant with her daughter. Whose children are they? We’ll get to that. They have a house on Orcas Island that Hannah doesn’t like to go to. So when Allan supports her son getting expelled from his fancy private school and sent away, she takes the kids and goes right to that house. Surely he won’t look for her there! Of course, Hannah has another reason for going there… the dead body that was found buried on the property nextdoor. Hannah comments how both she and Allan know what the discovery of that body means (we don’t know, but we find out!).

Hannah also sees Allan at home on a phone call which he then lies about. She knows because she checked his phone and he was not talking to the school. Allan is a cheater and an all-around gross human. Through his narration, we learn how much he likes to collect things, and it’s heavily implied that Hannah is one of those things. After Hannah leaves, he knows where she went because he gets the au pair to spill it. He then sleeps with her, knowing she’s attracted to him, though he doesn’t find her attractive outside of her vulnerability (gross). He sleeps with her multiple times, but throws her away the minute they are done. We definitely are led to suspect that Allan is a murderer and potentially an abuser. Did Allan kill the woman whose body was found next door? More on that later (but no, he did not kill her). Hannah is taking care of the kids and worrying about Allan arriving at the house. He definitely knows she’s there, but he doesn’t go see her (yet). Meanwhile a woman named Caroline arrives to clean the house, and she’s got more going on than meets the eye…

Who is Caroline?

We covered the fact that Caroline is one of the narrators. We get the first interaction between Caroline and Hannah when she arrives to clean the house, but Caroline has an alternate reason for being there. In fact, I wasn’t sure if she was actually a cleaning lady–I don’t think she was. Caroline has an obsession with a local man named Trey who is the caretaker for the property on Orcas Island as well as being a pastor at her local church. Trey is young, handsome, and charming. Caroline is delusional, judgmental, and old. What is the deal there? She mentions she has a son that isn’t much older than Trey. Still, she’s obsessed with him asking her over for bible study. She stalks him outside of his crossfit workouts. And Trey will come back around again later. Meanwhile Caroline makes an appearance in another story, and we learn her last name… Caroline Cooper is the mother of another narrator, Greene.

Who is Greene?

Greene’s story is narrated in the past, known only as “then”. He’s a child when the story begins (eight), and his mother has taken him to Orcas Island after another break up. On the island, they meet a charismatic man whom Greene calls “uncle”. When their ride doesn’t show, Uncle invites them back to his “farm”. It’s clearly a cult, but we see it through Greene’s child eyes and his descriptions of it. Greene’s mother (Caroline) is cold, he mentions he hasn’t been hugged or even touched by his mother in a very long time. She quickly decides to join the cult, and Greene goes outside on the land where he meets a girl the same age as him named Kestral. The two become close friends–Kestral is the only person who seems to understand Greene. Specifically, that Greene hears places and objects speaking to him and he is able to understand them at an emotional level. Eventually, he learns that he can also communicate with them and get them to do things.

One day Kestral tells Greene that Uncle is mad at her mother because there isn’t a baby in her tummy. This confuses them because she already has three children and also they ponder how there could be a child without a father. Their childlike innocence is kind of heartbreaking, because it is clear that Uncle is sleeping with the women (including Caroline) and wants to procreate. Eventually, Kestral’s mother does produce a child but he is born with some physical deformities and Uncle rejects him as a demon. At one point Kestral’s older sister, Eldest, tells them that she is Uncle’s favorite and if she does everything he asks, she will get her own bedroom. Horrifying, as this is clear to the reader that Uncle plans to assault Eldest. When she turns sixteen, she does get her own room in a sense, but the room is Uncle’s room. He replaces his current wife with Eldest. As they get older, Greene and Kestral stray farther from the farm when they can. A businessman begins construction on the property next door to the farm. Greene meets a boy while on one of these excursions who asks him about the farm. Greene tells the boy about the horror of the cult, which we learn is essentially a doomsday cult and that the women all sleep with Uncle all the time because they believe the world is ending (ugh). The boy is named Josh.

Who is Josh?

We’ve been getting Josh’s story all along. In the present, Josh is a famous violinist. Unexpectedly, he plays terribly at one of his concerts and he freaks out. He has a Stradivarius, but he continues to mention it isn’t actually his. It belongs to his father who lets him use it. He is in love with a composer named Drew, but Drew is beautiful and social. When Josh visits him, he finds Drew making out with another man and he’s sad about it. Josh has a weird relationship with food, always stuffing himself until he can barely breathe. He seems miserable about it. At one point when visiting Drew he hasn’t eaten in a few days and he mentions how freeing it is. Hmm… Josh continues to pop in and out of the periphery of Greene’s story in the past. In the present, Josh reveals that Greene helped him become a world famous violinist by communicating with the Stradivarius. It misses its old owner who had thick fingers, and Josh puts on weight to try to be more like that person. Greene tries to explain that isn’t how it works, but Josh isn’t the most open to that feedback. Eventually, we learn that his father–the one who owns the Stradivarius–is none other than… Allan.

How does it end?

There are a lot of things that happen to tie everything together, but let’s run through the big ones. In the present, Josh was searching for Greene because he needed him to “fix” his violin, which had stopped responding to him. He finds him in New York where Greene was living under a new identity after escaping from prison nine years earlier. Flashing back nine years, Greene noticed that Uncle was touched Kestrel inappropriately, and she revealed he has been assaulting her for months. Greene is furious and wants to find a way to flee. Kestrel doesn’t want to leave her sister Eldest or her brother Oliver, and accuses Greene of being mentally unwell because of his “magic”. Not long after, the feds come to raid the farm and Uncle forces everyone to stay barricaded inside. Eventually, he makes Kestrel and Littlest go with him to get more weapons. Greene forces the cabin to hold Uncle in as the feds approach and he and Kestrel flee with Littlest. Later, Greene was arrested for stealing artificacts from Allan (in reality, Josh gave him those).

In the present, Allan has paid his caretaker on Orcas Island, Trey, to convince Caroline to set up his wife Hannah for the murdered body that was found next door to his property, and eventually Hannah is arrested. Josh comes home to get money from Allan’s safe and instead he finds dental records for Hannah and her sister Gretchen, as well as birth certificates and social security cards. Earlier in the book we saw Allan break into a records office to steal those dental records. Hmm… Meanwhile, the dead body found next door is determined to be Kestrel and that means that Hannah is Eldest. Greene is devastated to learn Kestrel is dead when Josh visits him in the hospital. But when Hannah shows up, all is revealed.

The farm was raided and Greene was arrested. Kestrel never saw him again after he broke out of prison, and she learned she was pregnant with Greene’s child. Allan found Kestrel on the beach outside his property a week after the farm was raided. Kestrel is scared because Greene is gone, Eldest is missing, and she was solely responsible for her brother Littlest at only sixteen years of age. Allan and Kestrel get together (don’t judge her too harshly, she grew up being abused by older men, she didn’t know different and Greene was gone). It turns out that Kestrel was Gretchen, but she took her sister Hannah’s identity after the farm was raided because she couldn’t marry Allan at sixteen, but could at nineteen (Eldest / Hannah’s age). Hannah in the present day is the same person as Kestrel in the past storyline, and Eldest is the one who is buried on the property. Later, we learn that Caroline was the one who murdered Eldest the night of the raid because she found out Uncle was planning to flee with Eldest and not him. Caroline is…unhinged, to put it mildly. She sold Allan Hannah’s documents so he could have his sixteen year-old bride (gross). In the present, there are a number of confrontations on a ferry off the island that result in Caroline hitting Allan over the head with an axe and him pulling her with him when he plunges into the ocean.

In the epilogue, Josh, Hannah, Greene, and the two kids Oliver and Sibley have fled to Italy under new identities. They live happily near the beach. Greene asks oyster shells to turn into pearls for money, and they don’t worry about being found.

What did I think?

This was a complex story, but I liked that it didn’t reveal itself all at once. The beginning is confusing, I’ll be honest about that. It wasn’t clear how the stories related (other than Orcas Island), and it wasn’t clear how long ago Greene’s story was taking place. However, each time a character enters the storyline of another character, I got a jolt of excitement. This book is a puzzle where pieces fall into place one at a time. Fun! The ending was fast and furious, and I actually had to reread the chapter the night of the farm raid to make sure I understood everything. The weakest part of the story to me was Greene’s arrest, since we learned about that before the night of the raid and it was confusing how he and Kestrel didn’t know where the other was. I was happy they found their way back to one another.

This book has some heavy themes. It’s not just the cult, but more so the sexual abuse of teenagers. Uncle does this repeatedly and later, Allan reveals himself to be not much different. It’s every man’s dream to have a sixteen year-old bride, he muses at one point. But is it, Allan? Is that what every man wants? I hope not. Allan is gross. Super gross. He sets up Caroline to get his wife locked up, and of course we learned Caroline murdered Eldest in a fit of cult-based delusion, jealousy, and faux religious zeal. Caroline is a terrible person and an unlikable character, but she’s her own tragic story, having been taught throughout her life and her religious upbringing that women are put on earth to serve men. She essentially desires to be a slave to a man, no matter how he degrades her. This happened with Uncle, but it happens again with Trey in the present and it’s so sad.

It was an interesting and effective choice to show the cult through Greene’s eyes. When he arrived, he was only eight years-old, but even then he seems confused about it. At first, Greene tells us about a homestead-type cult, where they isolate themselves for society and work to grow their own food. Uncle gives sermon nightly and they all gather. As Greene got older, the reader learns more even when Greene hadn’t figured it all out yet. For instance, when he notes Uncle is mad at Kestrel’s mother because she isn’t pregnant, and they don’t understand why that matters since she already has kids. Later, they note how Eldest gets to share a room with him at sixteen, but she has to cut his toenails. They don’t seem to realize he is assaulting her. Later, when Greene learns Uncle has been assaulting Kestrel too, it becomes obvious. This is a doomsday sex cult, and Uncle is… an abusive creep.

In addition to the cult, the book is steeped in lore. Ancient artifacts that seem to hold meaning (and may be involved in the murder), whispers of witchcraft, and unexplained phenomenon. If I’m honest, these elements weren’t exactly necessary, but they added a fun layer to the story that I enjoyed. You don’t have to be a paranormal person to enjoy this. It’s not the point of the book, it just adds a lot of atmosphere and tone that makes the story feel richer. I liked the ending even if it felt a bit rushed.

Thank you to Harlequin Books for my copy. Opinions are my own.