50 pages • 1 hour read
The Butcher Game
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Background
Series Context: The Dr. Wren Muller Series
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
The Butcher Game follows The Butcher and the Wren, the first installment in the Dr. Wren Muller series in which the details of Wren and Jeremy’s past are revealed. In flashbacks, we learn that Jeremy attended medical school under the alias “Cal” and befriended Wren, then known as Emily. Emily was a diligent and motivated medical student, and she was kind to Cal. She trusted him, which made it possible for Jeremy to kidnap Emily and imprison her in the swamp near his house, along with other people he had kidnapped to hunt for sport. Emily escaped and later changed her name to Wren to symbolize her resilience and survival.
Because Wren escaped him, Jeremy became deeply obsessed with his failure to murder her. His fixation culminates in him stalking her and attempting to play a twisted game of cat and mouse with his new murders, which makes up the present-day plot of The Butcher and the Wren. Wren almost catches Jeremy, with help from Detective Leroux and the New Orleans Police Department, but he slips away. His escape haunts Wren, directly influencing her character arc in The Butcher Game.
Jeremy’s obsession with Wren is crucial to the second installment in the series. He becomes so singularly focused on luring Wren to Massachusetts and eventually killing her that he makes a series of mistakes that lead to his arrest. However, Jeremy’s arrest is not the end of the narrative; as the cliffhanger ending of this novel illustrates, he and Wren will continue to play a role in each other’s lives in further installments of the series.
Authorial Context: Alaina Urquhart and the True Crime Genre
Alaina Urquhart is the co-host of the hit 600-episode podcast Morbid: A True Crime Podcast, along with her niece and best friend, Ash Kelley. Urquhart and Kelly are only 10 years apart in age and were raised as sisters; their closeness is an integral aspect of their banter and humor. They also discuss the ethics of the true crime genre.
True crime is a genre of nonfiction that examines the criminal actions of people who would otherwise not be newsworthy; the idea is to highlight lurid or otherwise disturbing criminal behavior and discuss its impact on victims and others. The seminal work of the modern form of this genre is typically considered to be Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1966), which describes in detail the murders of a family in Kansas by two drifters and follows the perpetrators until they are executed.
In podcasting, true crime took off when the show Serial skyrocketed to popularity in 2014 with a season-long investigation into the murder of a young woman in Baltimore, raising questions about the guilt of the young man convicted of the crime. The success of this podcast showed the public’s interest in true crime and paved the way for more true crime podcasts in particular and podcasting as a media presence in general.
Critics of true crime point to its prurient and invasive nature; the desire to learn about the victims of violence or sexual assault often means re-traumatizing them and their loved ones as details about their personal lives are made into a spectacle without their consent.
Urquhart’s Morbid was one of Apple Podcasts’ Top 10 shows of 2024. In 2022, Urquhart and Kelly founded the Morbid Network, which houses five additional podcasts related to horror, true crime, and similar topics. In addition to Morbid, Urquhart and Kelly are also the hosts of the ReWatcher and Frozen Head podcasts. Prior to becoming a podcast host, Urquhart worked as an autopsy technician, a background that informs her characterization of Dr. Wren Muller, a forensic pathologist.
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