The quiet Amish town of Painter's Mill, Ohio is turned upside-down when a newly arrived family is brutally murdered. The tragedy is magnified by the discovery that one of the children, teenaged Mary, was involved with an outsider. Could that association be what has led to her death and the death of her entire family?

In PRAY FOR SILENCE, the second book in the Kate Burkholder series, author Linda Castillo once again takes her readers into the heart of the Amish society in a thrilling mystery that captures the end of a sense of innocence as a community struggles to understand the invasion to their private world.

Police Chief Kate Burkholder has few clues, no motive, and no suspect. Formerly Amish herself, Kate is no stranger to the secrets the Amish keep from the English, and each other, but this crime is horribly out of the ordinary. Ohio Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and Identification agent John Tomasetti arrives on the scene to assist. He and Kate have worked together before on a previous case during which they began a relationship fraught with sexual tension and stress. They soon realize the disturbing details of this puzzling case will test both their fortitude and their emotional limits and force them both to face demons from their own troubled pasts.

PRAY FOR SILENCE is a fast-paced, well-executed novel that is full of twists and turns that will leave the reader breathless from chapter to chapter. There is a good deal of violent description involved in the beginning that is a bit gruesome, but is relevant to convey the senseless crime that the main characters are out to solve. Castillo does a good job of blending the peaceable aspects of the Amish way with the more rough and tumble outlook of the "English," the outsiders to the religious order.