Abbott Kahler, who previously published under the name Karen Abbot, consistently writes works of narrative non-fiction that combine impeccable research, the story-telling devices of fiction, memorable characters, and impeccable prose. As a reader, I find it hard to put them down. As a writer, I marvel at her writing chops. As a reviewer, I struggle to write about them, because I don’t want to spoil any of the twists and turns.

Her newest book, Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia, has twists and turns aplenty and characters who blow past memorable to just plain crazy.

The book tells the story of three separate groups of Europeans who fled the fracturing world of Europe between the two world wars for the Galápagos Islands. Each group set out to create their own vision of a utopian paradise.

Kahler makes it clear from page one that their differing dreams of Utopia fail. She opens the book in 1934 with a macabre discovery on a tiny remote island in the northern part of the Galápagos: two bodies that had been mummified by the tropical sun. The two had died of thirst, leaving behind an overturned skiff, baby clothes, several photographs, and a batch of letters.

Leaving us with no hints about who the bodies were, or why they had ended up on a lava-covered island with no fresh water, she moves back several years and introduces us to the three groups who settled on the nearby island of Floreana: a German doctor with extreme ideas about health and natural living and his married lover/patient, a traumatized German veteran of the Great War and his family, and a gun-toting, riding crop-waving Austrian baroness known as “Crazy Panties” and her two young male paramours. Each of the three groups had different ideas about their island paradise should look like and conflict between them was inevitable and ultimately violent.

Eden Undone is beautifully written, intense, and creepy. A perfect book to pick up for the spooky season.