Book Review: Original Sins by Erin Young

Erin Young is the crime genre pseudonym of New York Times bestselling author Robyn Young, whose historical fiction has sold more than two million copies worldwide and includes the Brethren and Insurrection trilogies as well as two titles in the New World Rising series. A native of Devon, Young now makes her home in Brighton, England, where she writes full-time. Her debut suspense novel, The Fields, introduced series protagonist Riley Fischer and was a finalist for the International Thriller Writers Best First Novel Award.

In the follow-up, Original Sins, hard-charging Riley has left her job as sergeant/head of investigations of Iowa’s Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office for a rookie position with the FBI in Des Moines. While the move is promising for her career, it also means that she can distance herself from the limiting roles of overseer to her brother and pseudo-mother to her niece—not to mention a past trauma that has haunted her for decades. But Riley’s arrival coincides with the seeming reemergence of a serial predator known as the Sin Eater, whose brutal attacks have left several women emotionally and physically scarred for life and others dead. 

Riley—accustomed to a level of camaraderie among her team—is partnered with Special Agent Peter Altman, who appears indifferent to her presence and arouses suspicions through his loner tendencies and questionable actions. The two are assigned to investigate a threat against the state’s first female governor (who secured Riley’s appointment) and her family, and Riley soon discovers what she thinks is a link to the Sin Eater case. Deliberately sidelined by Altman, she struggles to balance her instincts with her instructions—all the while wondering if leaving home was a mistake. At the same time, the attacks begin to escalate, contradictory evidence causing investigators to question the assumptions they’ve made about the perpetrator.

Young uses a third person narration that allows Riley to be the focal point but also includes victims and the perpetrator(s). This not only lends itself to a heightened sense of fear that mirrors the community’s dread but humanizes the wounded and deceased while also illustrating the depravity of the acts against them. Further, the autumn-to-winter backdrop, with its inherent darkness and unrestrained elements, bolsters the isolation and unpredictability, not to mention the piercing chill that runs from inner to outer and back again. The investigation itself explores the destructive nature of toxic masculinity, which perpetuates cycles of misogyny and violence that have had a perpetual and corrosive effect on our culture.

While some sequels suffer the dreaded “sophomore slump,” Original Sins delivers on the promise that Erin Young showed in The Fields by expanding the internal and external landscapes she established there. Riley Fisher, the conflicted and compelling embodiment of strengths and vulnerabilities, is a character worth coming back to. She’s also one who now has fertile new ground to traverse—even as the familiarity and fraughtness of home remains firmly within her reach.