R. John Dingle

“R. John Dingle delivers an intoxicating mix of high tension, chilling atmosphere, and sharp pacing in this psychological thriller about religious fanaticism and revenge. Before the Devil Knows twists and turns, keeping you off balance on its way to a shocking end that will have you breathless and begging for the next Gus Wheeler book.”

– Darby Kane, #1 International Bestselling Author

Sometimes it’s not the devil you know…

When the disfigured body of a missing teenager is found in an unmarked grave in northern Maine, FBI agent Gus Wheeler and his partner arrive to investigate. They discover a second grave, but these remains are so badly burned, identification proves difficult. Yet the two bodies have something strange in common: a large lead cross laid upon each chest.

The locals are uncooperative, and the rural law enforcement is two steps behind. Enlisting help from a theology and biblical studies expert, they discover the murders are lifted straight from ancient scripture and the burials consistent with an archaic religious practice. Connecting the victims to a specific church adhering to a strict doctrine of the Old Testament creates more confusion than clarity.

As the investigation widens, the agents face threats and suspicion. Then someone inside the church begins leaving them clues, but are they friend or foe? With time running out, Gus must determine if their secret guide is leading them toward the answers or deeper into an underworld of twisted dogma and ancient rituals.

Editorial Reviews

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Teresa Brock, Best Thriller Books

R. John Dingle has officially reached the point where I will read absolutely anything he writes because this man understands suspense on a level that feels borderline dangerous. Before the Devil Knows grabs you by the throat from the first pages and never loosens its grip. This man is great at dropping a sentence at the end of the chapters that puts you in a choke hold right before the story body slams you with another twist you never saw coming. For longtime readers of the Gus Wheeler series, the payoff is even sweeter, with Easter eggs and references to previous novels. Let me say this now – Yes, these books can stand alone. No, you should not stop at one because your attachment to Gus, Vanessa, and the entire chaos filled orbit around them only gets stronger with every book.

I need to talk about Gus and Vanessa. These two are easily one of the best partnerships in crime fiction right now. Vanessa comes in with that younger, no bs, spunky energy while Gus moves through the world with his own rhythm. He’s got his jazz, his bass and his brilliant dyslexic mind constantly piecing together what everyone else misses. Their dynamic feels lived in now. There is trust, loyalty, frustration and humor. They know when to push and when to protect each other and that balance gives this series its heartbeat. Gus will always put his partner first and Dingle never lets readers forget that underneath the murders and madness are characters you genuinely care about. By this point in the series, they do not just feel like agents working a case. They feel real.

This investigation is dark. Rural Maine becomes its own character as Gus and Vanessa investigate suspicious deaths tied to a radical, cult-like church obsessed with punishment and morality. When bodies start showing up and a pattern emerges with every victim marked with a lead cross and brutal means of death, the FBI is called in. This takes place in a town that closes ranks the second outsiders start asking questions. You’ve got families too afraid to talk, a fire and brimstone preacher hanging over everything like a storm cloud and seemingly there are eyes everywhere. The tension in this book is unreal because you never know who is lying, who is watching, or who is about to snap. There are moments where the story turns so sharply you practically get whiplash trying to process what just happened. Holy fright. Dingle absolutely cranked the intensity to another level this time.

What I love most about this series is how sharp the details are. Dingle notices things other writers overlook entirely and somehow turns them into moments that make the story richer and more believable. Even something as small as paying the locksmith matters. Nothing is wasted. Every page moves and every detail counts. And that ending? Those three little words? I am still recovering. I could talk about this series for days because this is exactly what crime thriller readers keep begging for – smart investigations, brutal tension, characters that matter and twists that leave you staring at the wall questioning everything you thought you knew.

If you do nothing else this summer besides watching fireworks, read this book. Better yet, read the entire Gus Wheeler series because Before the Devil Knows just launched this story into the stratosphere and I already need the next book immediately.

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Natalie Kavale, BookTrib.com

“Before the Devil Knows” will keep you off balance. It carefully sows suspicion while steadily shifting the ground beneath you, leaving no theory entirely secure.”

Before the Devil Knows is the third installment in the critically acclaimed and award-nominated Gus Wheeler FBI Thriller series by R. John Dingle. This dark crime thriller follows Agent Gus Wheeler and his partner, Vanessa Lambert, as they investigate the murder of a 17-year-old boy, which quickly unearths a series of murders connected to ancient religious practices in a small town in northern Maine.

Gus and Vanessa are assigned a disturbing case: the disfigured body of a missing teenage boy is discovered in a shallow, unmarked grave in Kingston, Maine. Although they anticipate a difficult investigation, they are unprepared for the horrifying twist; the corpse bears an ancient-looking lead cross embedded along the length of the torso. The markings and the cross resemble those of a cold case of a 52-year-old male victim from eighteen months earlier.

Upon arriving in Kingston, the agents learn of a missing girl believed to be connected to the victim, possibly his girlfriend. Their investigation is, however, complicated by an uncooperative community; even the victims’ families are reluctant to assist them. As Gus and Vanessa conduct their investigation, they uncover two more unmarked graves.

Where Faith and Fear Converge

Their investigation then begins to point them toward ancient scriptures and to a local church led by a man who’s guided by strict religious beliefs rooted in Catholic fundamentalism and the Old Testament. To better understand the religious elements, Gus and Vanessa enlist the help of a religious and biblical studies expert. They also secretly receive help from one of the church members.

The more they investigate, the more bodies they discover, and the more brutal the nature of the murders appears. As the body count rises, so does resistance from the church and the community. And the agents even become targets themselves. As they try to find evidence for an arrest while still fighting off whoever is targeting them, another victim is captured. So, Gus and Vanessa must run against time to save the victim and uncover the truth before it’s too late.

Before the Devil Knows explores dark and unsettling themes centred on the intersection of faith, power and violence. Dingle’s characters are just as interesting in this book as in the first two. Gus Wheeler is a steady, observant and quietly authoritative individual, while his partner Vanessa has a sharper and more reactive edge. The duo creates a dynamic where each instinctively fills the other’s gaps. Their sibling-like bond and protectiveness toward each other are refreshing and engaging, and their ability to joke around humanizes them and helps them cope with the brutality of their work.

Characters like the reporter, the bible studies expert and the pathologist reinforce the mystery, the tension and the procedural depth of the story, and characters like Juju, the townspeople and church members serve a clear narrative function that contributes to an atmosphere where trust is scarce, and where everyone feels like a potential piece of a much larger and more disturbing puzzle.

A Landscape Steeped in Dread

Dingle effectively creates moods and tones through the setting. For example, the isolation of Kingston is emphasized through details like lost phone signals, narrow roads and dense forests, and ominous moods are built through cemetery scenes like the iron gate, enclosing woods and religious carvings on trees.

High-tension scenes in Before the Devil Knows are staged like dramatic close-ups, followed by shocking cuts to grotesque focal points and evoke a film-like storytelling. The action scenes stick to practical limitations, such as visibility issues and intense physical effort, and unfold through step-by-step problem-solving and realistic human reactions under stress. Even when the stakes are high, the action feels earned rather than artificially engineered for drama.

Dingle doesn’t shy away from brutality either. The crime scenes are graphic and have intense forensic imagery that is visceral and unflinching and borders on clinical horror, highlighting the author’s commitment to strong procedural authenticity and realism, which I truly appreciated.

Before the Devil Knows will keep you off balance. It carefully sows suspicion while steadily shifting the ground beneath you, leaving no theory entirely secure. If I don’t stop here, I will reveal too much. Thank you, Mr. Dingle, for crafting another captivating and bone-chilling crime thriller. I thoroughly enjoyed this one and look forward to the next.

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Bella G. Wright, BestThrillers.com

The Bottom Line: Irresistible. Before the Devil Knows pushes Dingle’s Gus Wheeler series into its darkest terrain yet, where religious terror and ritual murder collide.

Before the Devil Knows opens in the Maine woods with the kind of betrayal that makes a book impossible to put down. Teenager Adam Carson is dragged from his bed, hooded, beaten and chained to a tree and surrounded by robed figures chanting scripture. He recognizes people in the circle, but the book’s first true horror lands when his own mother steps forward and casts the first stone.

By the time Adam’s disfigured body is later found in an unmarked grave with a lead cross laid across it, FBI agent Gus Wheeler and his partner Vanessa Lambert are facing a murder that already feels less like an isolated killing than a ritual judgment. A religious pamphlet left on the agents’ truck, with a passage highlighted inside, becomes one of the investigation’s first signs that someone may be communicating with them rather than merely watching them. The highlighted passage inside raises urgent questions: is someone trying to help Gus and Vanessa, expose the killers, or point them toward a truth the church wants buried? Or is the message more manipulative than helpful, steering them toward a particular interpretation of the murders—or toward a particular suspect?

Series fans know that Dingle has built the series around violent openings, contained communities and clues that point toward hidden histories or private moral systems. In Karma Never Sleeps, the murder trail wound back toward a funeral card and the old secrets of a seemingly tight-knit town. In Wings of Madness, the disappearances around Music Row drew Gus and Vanessa into a psychologically charged manhunt shaped by memory gaps, performance, and predation. Here, the case quickly develops into a religiously charged procedural. Gus and Vanessa learn that Adam may not be the first victim in this ritual pattern, and when his girlfriend Mary Philips disappears after trying desperately to reach him, the investigation gains both urgency and emotional shape.

Their work is made harder by the setting. Kingston and the surrounding towns are remote, suspicious of outsiders, and thinly served by law enforcement. The agents are not simply looking for evidence. They are trying to break into a closed world where privacy, fear, faith and local loyalty have fused into something difficult to penetrate. That deepens one of the series’ most reliable pleasures: watching Gus Wheeler think. Gus notices patterns in symbols, behavior, scripture and staging. A carved Bible verse near Adam’s grave. The same chalk blessing above more than one doorway. A hidden photograph of Adam and Mary outside a church. Every decoded symbol seems to clarify the case while also suggesting that the killers may be operating from a logic Gus and Vanessa do not yet fully understand.

Place has always mattered in this series, and northern Maine may be Dingle’s most ominous use of New England atmosphere yet. Here, the roads narrow, cell service fades, cemeteries sit at the edge of wilderness and the distance between houses feels like a form of concealment. The landscape is not supernatural, but it is powerful. Accordingly, the Slaves of the Sacred Heart of Jesus gives the novel its most memorable early setting. At first glance, the church’s rural retreat is framed as one where children and teenagers work fields, tend animals, attend services and live within a self-sustaining religious community. But when Gus and Vanessa meet Father Benedict and youth ministry director Matthew Fleming, the pastoral image darkens. Matthew’s contempt for Mary and for anyone he sees as impure is not hidden behind politeness, and Father Benedict’s calm doctrinal certainty makes the place feel more dangerous, not less.

Around the church, Dingle populates the novel with figures whose certainty is more unsettling than overt menace. Even smaller presences such as the motel owner, guarded relatives, silent parishioners and local witnesses, contribute to the feeling of a region where everyone knows something and few are willing to say it plainly.

Their view of moral failure is chillingly absolute. One of the book’s sharpest effects is the way it turns familiar rural details—church signs, old cemeteries, farm work, motel rooms, logging roads—into pieces of a larger design.

This is also where Before the Devil Knows most clearly departs from the earlier books’ emotional register. Karma Never Sleeps carried the pleasures of a small-town murder mystery, with social entanglements, gossip, infidelity, and a killer hidden behind an attractive civic veneer. Wings of Madness moved into a more intense psychological space, using the music scene and the fear of lost time to complicate guilt and suspicion. Before the Devil Knows is colder. Its suspense comes less from social gamesmanship or unstable memory than from the terrifying confidence of people who believe punishment can be holy. The result is still a procedural, but one with the feel of a closed-community thriller steeped in ritual dread.

Vanessa Lambert remains an essential counterweight. In earlier entries, she grounded Gus’s exacting habits with sardonic wit and streetwise pragmatism; here, that wit becomes even more necessary. The subject matter is grim, the landscape isolating, and the church’s moral certainty increasingly oppressive. Vanessa’s impatience, humor, and instinctive suspicion keep the book from becoming airless. Her rapport with Gus is relaxed without being casual and affectionate without turning sentimental. They bicker, joke, read each other’s silences, and move through danger with the practiced rhythm of partners who understand how the other thinks.

The supporting cast adds useful friction. Sheriff Carl Roberts is cooperative but clearly facing a case beyond normal rural policing. Deputy Tim Gorham understands the local terrain and the local temperament, giving the investigation access it might otherwise lack. Professor Ward Simmons gives the religious material intellectual ballast without turning the story into a lecture.

Before the Devil Knows extends the Gus Wheeler series by carrying its strengths into more provocative territory. But this case gives Gus and Vanessa a more hostile test, forcing the agents to interpret a belief system as much as a crime scene.

The book may resonate with readers fascinated by cases like that of so-called doomsday mom Lori Vallow Daybell’s, where extreme belief, family betrayal, and claims of divine certainty become inseparable from violence. New readers can enter the series here without feeling lost, while returning readers will recognize a book that pushes its leads to the very edge.