Quick Take
- Narration: Chris Henry Coffey navigates the book’s multiple perspectives with a practiced thriller reader’s instinct for pacing – he keeps the tension taut without overselling individual scenes.
- Themes: Family legacy and complicity, true crime obsession, the gap between heroic myth and private truth
- Mood: Tense and increasingly claustrophobic, with a slow dawning horror as the layers peel back
- Verdict: A well-constructed thriller that delivers on its central mystery and handles a genuinely creepy family secret with skill – though readers who need strongly sympathetic protagonists may struggle with the early character work.
I was midway through my evening run when the first major revelation in Jennifer Hillier’s The Butcher landed, and I actually stopped walking. Not because I hadn’t seen it coming – good thrillers teach you how to see their twists arriving, then make you watch them anyway – but because Hillier had engineered the moment so that I was simultaneously in two timelines and both of them felt urgent. That is the craft that distinguishes a thriller that really works from one that merely moves quickly.
The Butcher is set in Seattle across two time periods. In 1985, decorated police chief Edward Shank shot and killed the Beacon Hill Butcher, a serial killer who had terrorized the city and became locally famous for ending the threat. Now Edward is in his eighties, living in a retirement community, while his grandson Matt has taken over the large Victorian home Edward handed down. Matt is an accomplished chef with a restaurant and a TV show in the works. Everything looks like a charmed life. Then he finds a crate buried in the backyard.
Our Take on The Butcher
Hillier has been writing thrillers for over a decade, and the mechanics here are smooth. She manages a two-perspective present-day narration – alternating between Matt, who knows the terrible thing in the crate, and Sam, his girlfriend and a true crime writer who has spent her adult life trying to determine whether her mother was a Butcher victim – with enough control that the dramatic irony never becomes frustrating. You see the collision coming and you cannot look away.
The central invention is elegant: what if the man celebrated for stopping a serial killer was not what the city believed him to be? Hillier is careful about how she reveals Edward’s secret and what she asks readers to do with it. She is not writing a redemption arc for him, but she is also not simply using him as a monster. The retirement community setting, with its mac-and-cheese Wednesdays and quiet routines, is deployed with a specific kind of irony that keeps the horror grounded rather than sensational.
Why Listen to The Butcher
Chris Henry Coffey’s narration is best when the novel’s pacing accelerates, which happens more frequently as the book progresses. He has a clean, unshowy delivery that serves thriller material well – he does not editorialize through inflection, which keeps the reader’s emotional responses from being directed rather than earned. Sam’s chapters particularly benefit from this approach. She is a true crime writer by profession, which means she is trained to organize and analyze disturbing information, and Coffey’s steady performance captures that professional composure even as her personal stakes escalate.
Reviewer Maryann Troche described the novel as mind-bending, specifically noting Hillier’s research into how serial killers think and operate. The thriller does engage seriously with criminal psychology rather than using it as shorthand, and that attention to process is one of the book’s more substantive qualities. The detail about how the new murders echo the Butcher’s old patterns, and what that echo means, is developed carefully rather than left as a vague atmospheric effect.
What to Watch For in The Butcher
Character sympathy is the novel’s most significant friction point. Matt, through whose perspective we learn the family secret, is written as someone whose good qualities are frequently overshadowed by his self-absorption and his treatment of the people around him. One reviewer who gave the book three stars described him as hard to like in a way that seemed to be the author wanting sympathy the prose had not earned. This is a legitimate response, though I read Matt slightly differently – Hillier seems aware of his unpleasantness and is using it to complicate the reader’s relationship with his moral dilemma. He is not the hero of his own story in the way he imagines.
Sam’s characterization as a doormat in early chapters is the sharper criticism, and it has more merit. She is introduced largely in relation to how Matt treats her rather than through her own interiority. That imbalance corrects itself as the novel progresses and Sam’s independent investigation takes over, but the early chapters ask for some patience from readers who need female protagonists established on their own terms from the start.
Who Should Listen to The Butcher
This is solid thriller territory for readers who enjoy intergenerational family secrets, true crime narrative threads woven into fiction, and the specific pleasures of a well-managed dramatic irony. Listeners who came to Jennifer Hillier through her earlier work will find this consistent with her strengths – the plot machinery is reliable, the setting is evocative, and the final revelation is genuinely unexpected. Those who need both protagonists to be likable from page one will have a harder time with Matt’s early chapters. And listeners who prefer psychological character studies to plot-driven thrillers may find the emphasis on revelation over interiority somewhat limiting. But for the reader who wants a Seattle-set serial killer mystery with a genuinely clever structural conceit, The Butcher earns its ten hours.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does The Butcher work as a standalone novel, or is it part of a series that requires prior reading?
It is a complete standalone. The novel has its own contained cast, setting, and mystery with no prior Hillier titles required. If you enjoy it, her backlist includes Jar of Hearts, Little Secrets, and Creep, among others, which share her thriller sensibility but feature entirely different characters and situations.
How does Chris Henry Coffey differentiate between Matt’s and Sam’s perspectives in the narration?
Coffey keeps the differentiation subtle rather than theatrical. Matt’s sections have a slightly more reactive quality, particularly in scenes where he is managing his secret. Sam’s chapters are cooler and more analytical, reflecting her professional habits as a true crime writer. The distinction is clear enough to orient listeners immediately without leaning on exaggerated vocal difference.
The synopsis mentions Sam’s mother may have been a Butcher victim – does the novel deliver a clear answer on that, or is it left ambiguous?
The novel resolves Sam’s central question about her mother. This is not a book that withholds its core mystery as a sequel setup – it delivers on the promise of the premise. The answer, and what it means for Sam’s understanding of her own history, is handled with care rather than deployed purely for shock value.
How violent or graphic is the serial killer content in this audiobook?
The violence is present and specific enough to earn the thriller classification, but Hillier is not writing in the torture-porn or extreme horror register. The murders are described in terms of their method and their psychological significance rather than through extended visceral detail. Readers who are sensitive to depictions of violence against women specifically should know that several of the victims are female, which is consistent with the serial killer’s historical profile in the story.
