BRTD Book Club - September 2026 | "The Butterfly Garden" by Dot Hutchison
About the event
Hello and, as always, a warm welcome to all our new BRTD members!👋🏼 It was lovely so see so many new faces during our last meeting.
Our next meeting will take place on Saturday, September 26th at 5:30PM at Le Parc Cafe inside the Coral Gables Country Club (*997 N Greenway Dr, Coral Gables, FL 33134*).
How It Works: A month(ish) prior to the next meetup, I will create the next event and announce the book we will be reading.📖 These will generally be in the mystery and thriller genre, of course. If anyone has suggestions or a book they've been wanting to read or that they read and loved that they feel would be good for this group, please don't hesitate to let me know!
For those of you who haven't joined us before: We order drinks/food, I will have some questions for you (love hearing your thoughts!), and the rest is a free-flowing discussion.
This month's read is "The Butterfly Garden" by Dot Hutchison.
"*Near an isolated mansion lies a beautiful garden.*
*In this garden grow luscious flowers, shady trees…and a collection of precious “butterflies”—young women who have been kidnapped and intricately tattooed to resemble their namesakes. Overseeing it all is the Gardener, a brutal, twisted man obsessed with capturing and preserving his lovely specimens.*
*When the garden is discovered, a survivor is brought in for questioning. FBI agents Victor Hanoverian and Brandon Eddison are tasked with piecing together one of the most stomach-churning cases of their careers. But the girl, known only as Maya, proves to be a puzzle herself.*
*As her story twists and turns, slowly shedding light on life in the Butterfly Garden, Maya reveals old grudges, new saviors, and horrific tales of a man who’d go to any length to hold beauty captive. But the more she shares, the more the agents have to wonder what she’s still hiding…*"
From the Publisher "Sometimes a story is powerful enough—and horrifying enough—to instantly transfix us and forever change the way we look at a simple object. In The Silence of the Lambs, it’s the lotion in the basket. In this gruesome crime novel, it’s butterflies.
Maya, a fierce survivor, leads us through the aftermath of a brutal event as she recounts her tale to the FBI, but her story keeps us at the edges, letting the questions simmer, bubbling up small answers that beg new, bigger questions in their wake: How did Maya escape captivity? Did the other girls survive? What happened to the garden—and the Gardener?
Maya reveals a vivid dimension to the twisted puzzle and raises larger questions about her own motives. As the truth slowly emerges from a carefully constructed cocoon, author Dot Hutchison has us questioning whether this is a tale of terrible beauty or a beautiful tale of terror.
The frantic rustling of a butterfly’s wings against a collector’s net seems futile—but when many butterflies flock together, they become much harder to pin down. For us, this innocuous symbol of transformative beauty will forever be a perverse reminder of the Gardener, a depraved man with his magnificent, grotesque collection of butterflies." • Alison Dasho and JoVon Sotak\, Editors
September Event WHEN: Saturday, September 26th WHERE: Le Parc Cafe (Coral Gables Country Club) TIME: 5:30PM
As always, I look forward to seeing you all at our next meeting. I hope you all enjoy the book but if not, at least we'll have a great time discussing it!
