The Laughing Dead
The Laughing Dead (Steinback & Reed #3)
By: Jess Lourey
[Fulfilled ‘A book with more than 25 chapters’ prompt as part of Shelf Reflection’s 2025 Reading Challenge]
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2025]
“My life was devolving into a tightrope walk over lit dynamite, flame racing down the fuse toward the cap.”
I read book one— The Taken Ones— but I decided not to read book two— The Reaping— because it was all about kids being taken and I usually avoid those kind of books. Not that the Taken Ones or The Laughing Dead aren’t hard to read in their own right. I just know what sticks in my head and what doesn’t.
These two Lourey books that I’ve read proved that she knows how to write a creepy book. She finds weird biological anomalies and then fashions characters around them that freak you out a little bit. But even though there is some gruesomeness, I appreciate that she doesn’t add to that a whole bunch of swearing and sexual content.
And in this particular series, Reed and Steinbeck are definitely a pair you love and root for. I’m a little worried that Lourey might have intended this series to be a trilogy because The Laughing Dead did not end on a cliffhanger, but I’m hoping for more books for them!
I would definitely recommend reading this series in order. The main character, Van (Evangeline) is on a character development arc that you won’t fully understand unless you see her progress. There are also probably going to be spoilers to the other books just by knowing the plot of this book, so if you plan to read the other books and haven’t yet, I would probably wait to read the rest of this review.
Van grew up in a cult. She is out of it now, but she is still haunted by her time there and what happened to her and the other girls. Part of what haunts her are the visions she gets. It’s a bit supernatural and not really explained, but she often sees visions of crimes being committed. It has helped her be a great detective and now cold case detective.
The series revolves around her and Harry Steinbeck. Van is still a messy, rule-bending investigator and Harry is still the proper, uptight scientist. But this book is where we see a shift in their relationship.
First, here’s where we’ve come from:
The Taken Ones cliffhanger ends with Harry saying, “He’d tell her his secret another time. He liked things as they were right now, with the two of them friends, her thinking of him as a good man.”
I was very curious what his secret would be. From what I gather about book two, I think it’s his guilt over his sister’s abduction. He somehow feels responsible. She was not taken in The Reaping, but something still happened in Duluth that brought up his sister. I believe the cliffhanger of The Reaping has something to do with this:
“Thanks to what I’d learned up in Duluth, after nearly twenty years of hiding from my childhood, I was now running toward Frank. And it was for the most horrifying reason of all. I believed that in 1998, he’d abducted my partner Harry’s little sister.”
That is the secondary thread of The Laughing Dead. Van has to face her nightmares and investigate whether Harry’s sister ended up on Frank’s Farm (the cult) or if he did something to her elsewhere. She might even have to come face to face with Frank Roth again.
But this investigation has to all be in secret. She is not ready to tell Harry her hunch and this creates a wedge between them. He knows she’s hiding something.
Now that we’re a little bit caught up, the primary thread of The Laughing Dead is the murder of a woman that may be a reprisal of a serial killer from the 80s that poisoned his victims with a tincture that caused “risus sardonicus”— which is a spasming of the facial muscles resulting in corpses with really wide grins. Hence- the laughing dead.
Yeah. It’s super creepy and I’m glad Lourey opted not to make the cover image of that.
Van has to re-investigate the deaths of three girls in the suburbs of Minneapolis to see what connects them with this most recent murder. All three girls’ deaths were considered suicides and nothing but one newspaper article had thought to try to make any connection between them.
In the midst of investigating the murders and Harry’s sister’s abduction, Van is also battling her own inner demons and guilt. I won’t say anything about that except the ‘Sweet Tea Killer’. We have a little bit of an unreliable narrator situation because of Van’s visions, her nightmares make her fear that she’s been sleepwalking— could she have slept-killed? She also keeps having run-ins with people wearing red scarves.
“Sometimes, when my visions got bad, reality and nightmares blurred together, giving the waking world a weird hallucinatory cast.”
Van has a lot to sift through before the killer strikes again or they lose any leads on what happened to Harry’s sister.
“All I had to do was quick-solve the decades-old cold case involving three girls who’d died wearing gruesome clown smiles, figure out why my ID had been discovered on the scene of a similar recent case, and find out if Frank Roth had abducted Caroline Steinbeck and, if so, what he’d done with her.”
One critique:
Van is looking for information on Frank Roth and hires someone to do research for her. He finally sends her an email and the subject line says ‘No Luck.’ Then she goes- “Well, at least I didn’t have to waste my time reading the email.”
Nope. I don’t know a person, let alone a detective, that would only read the subject line of an email they’d been waiting for about something really important and think— No. I’m not going to click this button my finger is hovering over and take 15 seconds to see what he has to say. This makes no sense.
If Lourey needed Van to miss information about something, I wish she would have come up with a better way than lack of curiosity about a vital email.
Three comments:
I have never heard of Chi-Chi’s restaurant until I read this book. Literally one day later I’m scrolling Facebook and there is a news article about a Chi-Chi’s opening up. Turns out the restaurant chain closed down decades ago and JUST reopened it’s first location of its rebranding in St. Louis Park, MN on October 6th.
WHAT ARE THE ODDS?! And I’m a little freaked out that that news article popped up for me because I have not typed Chi-Chi’s into my phone or even said the word aloud until I saw that article.
But anyway, if you are old enough to have enjoyed Chi-Chi’s and this book created nostalgia for their TexMex food… you are surprisingly in luck. (I’ll send you an email with the restaurant location with the subject line ‘in luck’ and see if you’re curious enough to open it and find out where you can get your food.)
I learned in this book the origins of ‘sardonic smile’ and I’ll probably never forget it. This article gives all the details, but apparently a couple thousand years ago on the island of Sardinia, they gave hemlock water-dropwort plant for their ritualistic killings— old people and criminals— and it caused the corpses to have the smiles. Homer coined the term ‘sardonic smile.’ I guess they just realized all of this like ten years ago which is pretty crazy.
If you are interested in another book that involves heterochromatic eyes, check out Brian Freeman’s latest book Photograph.
Recommendation
I do recommend this book if you aren’t freaked out by dead people smiling. There are no visuals so that helps. But if your imagination is going to give you nightmares about that, this might not be the right fit.
There are a couple other series that I would also recommend to you that this series reminded me of. Mike Omer’s Abby Mullen series is about a hostage negotiator who also survived a cult and is haunted by the cult leader who escaped. Robert Dugoni’s Tracy Crosswhite series is about a detective who became a detective after her sister was murdered by a serial killer. Both of those are also pretty clean and very suspenseful series.
[Content Advisory: 0 f-words, 13 s-words; hard to read passages about happenings in the cult; some gruesome images surrounding death are described]
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
This book just published in July, 2025. You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.
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