The Butcher and the Wren

The Butcher and the Wren (2022) is a 2022 suspenseful true crime and horror novel by American autopsy technician, true crime podcaster, and author Alaina Urquhart. The narrative shifts between the perspectives of forensic pathologist Wren Muller and serial killer Jeremy Rose and between the events of the present day and seven years prior. The plot follows Jeremy as he continues on a killing spree across New Orleans, Louisiana and Wren as she tries to put the clues together to catch him and put a stop to him, once and for all. The novel deals with The Dangers of a Controlling Nature, The Pursuit of Justice, and Going Beyond the Call of Duty when apprehending criminals.

This guide refers to the 2022 Zando Kindle Edition eBook.

Content Warning: This book deals with graphic violence and potentially disturbing themes related to a serial killer and his crimes.

Plot Summary

Jeremy kidnaps and keeps a couple, Matt and Katie, in his basement at his house in The Bayou. He has Katie on an IV drip, which he checks before ripping out her fingernail as punishment for screaming. He’s been interested in lobotomies and experimentation since childhood, when he was often left unsupervised in the library with access to any books he wanted. He plans to kidnap his classmate from Tulane Medical school, Emily, to join his other victims.

Wren Muller, a forensic pathologist, arrives at a crime scene in the New Orleans bayou and finds a dead woman. Two weeks prior, another woman was found, and the police believe that the murders are connected due to a book page found in the past victim’s throat and a paperback horror novel left at this crime scene. Wren checks the body and establishes a time of death before taking the body back to the morgue for an autopsy. 

Jeremy watches the news before he goes back to the basement to check on Matt and Katie. Matt becomes combative and tries to escape, so Jeremy kisses him, biting his lip until it bleeds. He then leaves for his data entry job, where he watches newsreels of vigils for Matt and Katie and makes talks to his coworkers. 

Wren examines the body during the autopsy. Her time of death estimate was wrong, and she struggles to identify why, until it becomes clear to her that the killer refrigerated the body before dumping it in the swamp. She tells Detective John Leroux, who arrives at the autopsy suite, of her findings. He tells her that the book left at the crime scene had a library card left in it that belongs to Philip Trudeau, a man who has not lived in Louisiana since middle school. The book was also stolen from the library only days before. There were no other leads besides a scrap of paper left on the victim with a fleur-de-lis pattern. When Wren returns home from work, she cannot shake the feeling that she knows the name Philip Trudeau. She discusses the case with her husband, Richard.

When Jeremy returns home, he delights in the fear that his victims must feel at the sound of his arrival. He reminisces on the memory of his abusive father bringing home a dying doe that was hit by a car and showing Jeremy how to end its suffering. Though his father meant it as a kindness, Jeremy was exhilarated by watching the animal die. He returns to the basement and his victims again.

Wren wakes from a nightmare in which she saw her crying parents before finding herself in a swamp unable to run as a man taunted her. She shakes off the fear before she gets a call from John to come to yet another crime scene. At the scene, where another woman’s body was found, John picks up Wren’s business card from the sidewalk, clearly left by the killer. This rattles Wren, and John promises her police protection, though he hopes that the killer is only showing his knowledge of how investigations work and not directly threatening Wren. 

Jeremy plans excitedly to kidnap Emily. When he arrives at their biology lecture, he sits behind her and watches her take notes, especially focused on the silver bracelet on her wrist with an anatomical heart charm. He watches her, but she doesn’t notice his gaze and says hi to him, referring to him as “Cal,” the alias under which he registered for medical school. When class is over, he walks her to her car before chloroforming her, injecting her with ketamine, and stuffing her in the trunk of her own car. He takes off his fake beard and looks at his brown hair dye running on his sweaty forehead. 

Wren goes out for her friend’s birthday. She has her tarot cards read and finds the results disturbingly related to the case, so she leaves the evening early. While driving home, she spots John and his partner, Will, at a bar. She stops in and talks with them, and suddenly John spots a flier for an upcoming jazz festival that has the same print as the paper scrap found on the victim. After analysis, it is confirmed to be the same paper, so the group concludes that the next body drop will happen at that festival, and they formulate a plan to catch the killer. 

Jeremy watches Emily through the video monitors as she wakes up in The Bayou behind his house. He tells her, Matt, and Katie that if they want to live, they must take the flashlight he’s left near each of them and escape from his property while he hunts them. He turns on music and heads into the swamp.

Wren and the police attend the jazz festival with hopes of finding the killer. The Smell of Decay fills the air, and John and Wren follow it to one of the smaller stages. Beneath it, they find a body holding a map of one of the New Orleans cemeteries with an X on one of the plots. Wren puts the number of the plot into the suspiciously clean smart watch on the victim’s wrist, and a timer shows up. Wren, John, and the other police hurry to the cemetery.

Jeremy watches as Emily runs through the swamp before finding Katie. Emily tries to keep Katie calm as Jeremy shoots at them. They find Matt, but Jeremy shoots him in the head. Katie and Emily run away again, but Katie’s legs stop working due to the synthetically modified Jamaican ginger that Jeremy injected in her through the IV bag. Emily tries to help Katie but leaves her behind after Jeremy shoots Katie in the leg and then slits her throat. Jeremy catches Emily after she is shocked by an electric fence, and he puts tropicamide eyedrops in her eyes to blur her vision and stabs her in her lumbar spine to sever her spinal cord and paralyze her. He then leaves her in The Bayou. When he returns for Emily the next day, he finds that she used Katie’s body to absorb the electricity from the fence and climbed over to freedom.

Wren and John arrive at the cemetery and find the plot freshly dug. As they start to dig it up, they find an egg timer. They continue digging until they find a casket. They pry it open and find a woman, clearly buried alive, with a silver bracelet with an anatomical heart on her wrist. They find a weak pulse and rush her to the hospital. She dies, due to hemlock poison in her blood. 

Wren finally recognizes the realization she’s been avoiding: The serial killer is the Bayou Butcher, the same person who kidnapped and tortured her years ago when she was a medical student known as Emily. The events in The Bayou were seven years ago, and now the killer is back. When John arrives at the autopsy suite, she tells him the truth about her identity and removes herself from the case. She also tells him that she remembers that Philip Trudeau was the name of “Cal’s” childhood best friend, and John promises to call Philip again.

In the present, Jeremy feels unsettled and angry that his latest victim, Emma, was alive when they found her, though she died due to his poison. He goes to a bar and picks up a lawyer named Tara. He drives her into the woods under the guise of going for a walk before he takes his knife out and begins to hunt her. While he is throwing rocks at her, night hunters hear them, so he quickly slits her throat and flees. She survives thanks to help from the hunters and writes Jeremy’s name down for the police. Wren knew Jeremy as Cal but remembers Katie referring to their captor as Jeremy. 

Jeremy prepares his house for his inevitable capture after watching the news and seeing that Tara survived. Later, he breaks into Wren’s home through a window in the basement and steals her grandmother’s ring that she keeps on her nightstand, before watching her and her husband sleep.

Wren wakes up and realizes that the hemlock poison from the most recent victim is familiar; the only other recent hemlock death was an elderly woman and was ruled a suicide. She looks up the woman and finds that she has a son named Jeremy Rose. She calls John to tell him, and he confirms the name, which was the same name that Philip Trudeau gave him. Though Richard tells her not to, Wren goes with John to Jeremy’s property. 

Jeremy prepares his home for the police, taking a body out of the freezer in the basement to make his house smell and smashing a vase on the floor to distract the officers. He also leaves Wren’s grandmother’s ring on the coffee table, before grabbing his crossbow and going into the bayou.

When the police arrive, they cannot find Jeremy. Wren finds her ring on the table and is horrified by the realization that Jeremy has been in her house. She goes to the basement to examine the rotting body, but she and the police are drawn into the swamp by the sound of music playing. They look for Jeremy, finding another body, before John is shot in the leg with the crossbow. Jeremy appears, and Wren grabs John’s gun from his holster and points it at Jeremy. She cannot bring herself to shoot, but Will shoots Jeremy in the chest. Jeremy crawls away as Wren tends to John. An officer calls for her to confirm Jeremy’s death, but when she goes to the body, she finds it’s not him, just a man dressed like him, who was shot in the head instead of the chest. Jeremy escaped.

Jeremy walks out of the bayou and takes off his bullet proof vest. He’s happy to have outsmarted the police and plans to go hundreds of miles away from them.