Why You'll Love This
A cult member. A dead newborn. A lawyer nobody can explain — and a story that refuses to let you decide who's guilty.
- Great if you want: courtroom tension wrapped around a deep dive into cult psychology
- The experience: taut and unsettling — moral clarity dissolves the further you read
- The writing: Howes builds dread through restraint, letting silence do the heavy lifting
- Skip if: infant death as a plot device is something you can't read past
About This Book
In rural Vermont, a woman emerges from decades inside a fringe religious community to make a desperate phone call — and finds herself facing a murder charge. The Tribes follows both Heather Garner, a cult member whose life has been shaped entirely by control and isolation, and Abby Harris, the defense attorney willing to fight for someone most people have already condemned. Mari Howes doesn't ask readers to sympathize easily or judge quickly. Instead, she builds a story about what happens to a person's identity — and sense of right and wrong — when it's been systematically dismantled over years. The stakes are life and death, but the real question running beneath everything is more unsettling: how well do any of us understand the choices made in circumstances we've never faced?
What distinguishes this novel as a reading experience is Howes's discipline with perspective and pacing. She resists the urge to explain too much too soon, trusting readers to sit with ambiguity the way the characters must. The dual focus — insider and outsider, defendant and defender — creates a tension that tightens steadily without resorting to melodrama. It's a confident, structurally assured debut.