LitHub/CrimeReads best new debut selection
Popsugar Book Club best new thrillers selection
Winner of the 2020 American Fiction Award for Thriller: Crime from American Book Fest
Sins of the Bees blends the majesty and mystery of Where the Crawdads Sing with the character explorations of The Girls to present the lives of two very different women and their tumultuous interactions with a dangerous doomsday cult.
Other than her bonsai trees, twenty-year-old arborist Silvania August Moonbeam Merigal is alone in the world. After first her mother dies and then her grandfather—the man who raised her and the last of her family—Silva suffers a sexual assault and becomes pregnant. Then, ready to end her own life, she discovers evidence of a long-lost artist grandmother, Isabelle.
Desperate to remake a family for herself, Silva leaves her island home on the Puget Sound and traces her grandmother’s path to first a hippie beekeeper named Nick Larkins, and then to a religious, anti-government, Y2K cult embedded deep in the wilds of Hells Canyon. Len Dietz is the charismatic leader of the Almost Paradise compound, a place full of violence and drama: impregnated child brides called the Twelve Maidens, an armed occupation of a visitor’s center, shot-up mountain sheep washing up along with a half-drowned dog, and men transporting weapons in the middle of the night.
As Isabelle paints portraits of Len Dietz and the Twelve Maidens ceremonially progressing toward their group marriage on the prophesized end of the world—January 1, 2000, the new millennium—Silva moves ever closer to finding her grandmother in Hells Canyon and finds herself drawn Nick, whose life is also irrevocably tied to Len Dietz.
As tensions erupt into violence, Silva, Isabelle, Nick, and the members of Almost Paradise find themselves disastrously entangled. And like the ancient bonsai struggling to navigate territories both new and old, Silva is forced to face both her own history of loss, and the history of loss she’s stepped into: ruinous stories of family that threaten to destroy them all.
Genre: Mystery
Popsugar Book Club best new thrillers selection
Winner of the 2020 American Fiction Award for Thriller: Crime from American Book Fest
Sins of the Bees blends the majesty and mystery of Where the Crawdads Sing with the character explorations of The Girls to present the lives of two very different women and their tumultuous interactions with a dangerous doomsday cult.
Other than her bonsai trees, twenty-year-old arborist Silvania August Moonbeam Merigal is alone in the world. After first her mother dies and then her grandfather—the man who raised her and the last of her family—Silva suffers a sexual assault and becomes pregnant. Then, ready to end her own life, she discovers evidence of a long-lost artist grandmother, Isabelle.
Desperate to remake a family for herself, Silva leaves her island home on the Puget Sound and traces her grandmother’s path to first a hippie beekeeper named Nick Larkins, and then to a religious, anti-government, Y2K cult embedded deep in the wilds of Hells Canyon. Len Dietz is the charismatic leader of the Almost Paradise compound, a place full of violence and drama: impregnated child brides called the Twelve Maidens, an armed occupation of a visitor’s center, shot-up mountain sheep washing up along with a half-drowned dog, and men transporting weapons in the middle of the night.
As Isabelle paints portraits of Len Dietz and the Twelve Maidens ceremonially progressing toward their group marriage on the prophesized end of the world—January 1, 2000, the new millennium—Silva moves ever closer to finding her grandmother in Hells Canyon and finds herself drawn Nick, whose life is also irrevocably tied to Len Dietz.
As tensions erupt into violence, Silva, Isabelle, Nick, and the members of Almost Paradise find themselves disastrously entangled. And like the ancient bonsai struggling to navigate territories both new and old, Silva is forced to face both her own history of loss, and the history of loss she’s stepped into: ruinous stories of family that threaten to destroy them all.
Genre: Mystery
Praise for this book
"Lush and sweeping in its language and its landscape, Sins of the Bees takes us to the heart of human need—for love, for family, for a reason to stay alive. Moving between the verdant Pacific Coast and the arid breaks of Hells Canyon, from the artist's reflective sensibility to the survivalist's absolute desire to own and control the people around him, Lampman weaves a story of destiny and desperation that pitches one woman's quest for paradise against the violent will of a man bent on domination and destruction." - Kim Barnes
"With exquisite prose, Lampman’s Sins of the Bees weaves the brutality and beauty of nature, the depths of loss and the grief of love, and the twisted beliefs of a religious cult into an edge of your seat literary thriller." - Kim Taylor Blakemore
"Sins of the Bees is a fascinating glimpse into the world of a paranoid doomsday cult, with echoes of The Handmaid's Tale—though this isn't science fiction. This heartfelt contemporary literary thriller brings together multiple timelines into a compelling whole, with elements of romance, suspense, and mystery intertwining. Annie Lampman is clearly a writer to watch." - Dan Chaon
"Compelling and deeply affecting, Sins of the Bees is a literary thriller about two women’s search for identity and their struggle to feel grounded and loved; to belong. I felt submerged in the lyrical writing, swept away by the undertows of desire, desperation, loss, and redemption. Annie Lampman’s debut is a stunner." - Lesley Kagen
"Sins of the Bees is a complex and beautifully written family saga about loss, tragedy, and redemption set against the unsettling confines of a cult in rural Idaho. Silva and Isabelle are unforgettable protagonists questing for meaning, belonging, and family. Annie Lampman’s gorgeous, astonishing debut kept me up way too late at night!" - Mary Pauline Lowry
"Sins of the Bees echoes the work of writers like Annie Proulx and Rick Bass in its portrayal of memory-haunted folks inextricably bound to the harsh and beautiful land." - Daniel Orozco
"Sins of the Bees is a breathtaking, multi-layered meditation on love and loss, family and faith. With an urgency befitting our times, Lampman exposes the devastating price we pay when we empower cunning, amoral leaders. An ambitious debut that pits the family we're born into against the one we choose for ourselves." - Marco Rafalà
"More than a human melodrama, Lampman uses everything she knows from backpacking into the land around Idaho’s Snake River and Hell’s Canyon to add realism to her tale of love and loss. In fact, this is both a naturalist’s guide to the sunbaked sections of the Pacific northwest—the plants and animals that live there (including bees and bonsai trees)—and a literary thriller of a romance that keeps the reader hanging on to the epilogue. Brava, Ms. Lampman!" - Mitch Silver
"Grief in the green bounty, passion in the deep desert, the regrets of our ancestors coursing in our veins—Sins of the Bees is about the ways we in the American West try and fail, and yet might keep trying, to be in more sustaining relationship with ourselves, one another, and all the land that holds us. The writing here is breathtaking, as is the vision. This is a striking debut." - Joe Wilkins
"With exquisite prose, Lampman’s Sins of the Bees weaves the brutality and beauty of nature, the depths of loss and the grief of love, and the twisted beliefs of a religious cult into an edge of your seat literary thriller." - Kim Taylor Blakemore
"Sins of the Bees is a fascinating glimpse into the world of a paranoid doomsday cult, with echoes of The Handmaid's Tale—though this isn't science fiction. This heartfelt contemporary literary thriller brings together multiple timelines into a compelling whole, with elements of romance, suspense, and mystery intertwining. Annie Lampman is clearly a writer to watch." - Dan Chaon
"Compelling and deeply affecting, Sins of the Bees is a literary thriller about two women’s search for identity and their struggle to feel grounded and loved; to belong. I felt submerged in the lyrical writing, swept away by the undertows of desire, desperation, loss, and redemption. Annie Lampman’s debut is a stunner." - Lesley Kagen
"Sins of the Bees is a complex and beautifully written family saga about loss, tragedy, and redemption set against the unsettling confines of a cult in rural Idaho. Silva and Isabelle are unforgettable protagonists questing for meaning, belonging, and family. Annie Lampman’s gorgeous, astonishing debut kept me up way too late at night!" - Mary Pauline Lowry
"Sins of the Bees echoes the work of writers like Annie Proulx and Rick Bass in its portrayal of memory-haunted folks inextricably bound to the harsh and beautiful land." - Daniel Orozco
"Sins of the Bees is a breathtaking, multi-layered meditation on love and loss, family and faith. With an urgency befitting our times, Lampman exposes the devastating price we pay when we empower cunning, amoral leaders. An ambitious debut that pits the family we're born into against the one we choose for ourselves." - Marco Rafalà
"More than a human melodrama, Lampman uses everything she knows from backpacking into the land around Idaho’s Snake River and Hell’s Canyon to add realism to her tale of love and loss. In fact, this is both a naturalist’s guide to the sunbaked sections of the Pacific northwest—the plants and animals that live there (including bees and bonsai trees)—and a literary thriller of a romance that keeps the reader hanging on to the epilogue. Brava, Ms. Lampman!" - Mitch Silver
"Grief in the green bounty, passion in the deep desert, the regrets of our ancestors coursing in our veins—Sins of the Bees is about the ways we in the American West try and fail, and yet might keep trying, to be in more sustaining relationship with ourselves, one another, and all the land that holds us. The writing here is breathtaking, as is the vision. This is a striking debut." - Joe Wilkins
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