Lost Village
Michael Saver
FriesenPress (2025)
ISBN: 978-1038334060
Reviewed by Heather Curran for Reader Views (12/2025)
The beauty of small village living is that everyone knows everyone and their families, and the families’ gossip. Privacy doesn’t quite exist when friendly neighbors are curious about what’s happening one street over. And so Michael Saver’s mystery novel, Lost Village: The Conawalki Murder Mysteries, opens while a woman, staring through her binoculars, narrates the town’s goings-on to her twin sister. All of this is par for the course until the next morning, when the binoculared woman is found bound, gagged, and dead in her home.
Lost Village follows a collection of characters as they attempt to unravel the grisly murder. Spearheading the cast are three adolescent boys, fondly known as “The Three Smart Boys,” who are primarily interested in passing their high school classes, playing music, and outsmarting the local bullies. Saver’s characters are witty, and he develops them with a sense of dry humor and wry cheekiness.
“The Three Smart Boys,” Mark, Flix, and Seb, are young men growing up in the early 1970s when compassion for individuals outside the mainstream is thin or nonexistent. Saver explores what it means to be a member of the LGBTA+ community in a time when brutality and intolerance were the norm. Early in the novel, Mark literally awakens from a dream and finally recognizes or admits to himself his strong emotions for Flix. In other parts of the town, though, other men are not within the bliss of romance and love but are struggling with anonymous and criminal cruelty.
Saver’s villain is more than just a traditional “bad guy.” Saver’s mystery writing leads readers through twists and turns as he toys with red herrings and archetypal characters that he adeptly turns on their heads. Lost Village has supernatural hints. The villain originally refers to himself as “The One” and, as he harvests victims, changes to the name “Havoc.” And he does a fantastic job wreaking havoc.
Fans of Shirley Jackson or the recent young adult Death Cast novel series will enjoy following “The Three Smart Boys” as they try to protect members of their village from Havoc and preserve their friendship in Lost Village, the first book in The Conawalki Murder Mysteries series by Michael Saver.