Amazon.com Review
To that extremely short list of crime-solving clerics who manage to be convincing as both priests and detectives (such as
G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown and
Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael) , we can now add Lily Connor. "In the most peaceful of settings, she still gave off an incongruous set of messages in her jeans, hand-tooled cowboy boots, army surplus slicker and clerical collar," writes Michelle Blake of Lily in her impressive debut. "In high school she had been the skinny overgrown geek, the outcast, the reader of poems and 19th Century novels. She still pictured herself that way." Her best friend Charlie, a fellow Episcopalian priest, tries to convince her that being tall and skinny now, at 36, makes her not a geek but a cultural icon. Lily is equally unsure of her role in the church: she had been running a women's center in Boston until her father's terminal illness took her home to Texas for six months. Now she's back in Boston, working as the interim priest--or tentmaker--at a rich church whose rector has just died under circumstances that turn out to be suspicious.
Blake, a poet who has a master's degree from Harvard Divinity School, writes cool and sparkling prose that gives her first mystery an unusual depth. As the church struggles with issues of sexuality, her clerics and parishioners mirror that struggle. Did the late Father Barnes kill himself with an overdose of insulin because of his feelings toward the 16-year-old son of one of the congregation's richest members? That's one possibility; even worse is the chance that Father Barnes was murdered because of someone else's sins. Equally riveting is Lily's growing dilemma: what to do with the potential scandal that she has unearthed. "Back at her desk, she thought of the ways in which her life and vocation had always been so clear to her, the terrain mapped miles into the future--mountains and plains, good guys and bad guys, right and wrong, faith, friendship. Now she groped down a dim corridor, feeling her way inch by inch, barely able to tell where she stood at that instant, much less where anyone else stood, much less where she was headed."
It's this quality of enriched uncertainty that bonds us with Lily, regardless of our own beliefs, and makes this such a promising debut. --Dick Adler
From Publishers Weekly
Another clerical snoop takes to amateur sleuthing in this stylish debut from a poet and graduate of Harvard Divinity School who once considered becoming an Episcopal priest. Blake's heroine, Lily Connor, is a "tentmaker"Aan ordained priest who works outside the church. Lily is a spiritual nomad who, as the novel begins, has been assigned to serve as interim priest at Boston's St. Mary of the Garden Episcopal Church after the sudden death of the church's long-time spiritual head, Father Fred Barnes. Lily's faith and authority are challenged immediately: the parishioners seem disinterested in her attempts to help them adjust to Barnes's death; the vestry members are downright hostile to her. When the sexton almost dies in a suspicious fall, Lily begins to suspect Barnes was murdered and assembles an odd trio of investigators: her best friend, Charlie Cooper, a Brother in the Anglican Order of St. Peter; Mrs. Hanlon, the loyal rectory cleaning woman who revered Father Barnes; and cop Tom Casey, whose mother is a friend of Mrs. Hanlon. After discovering that Barnes had damaging information about a parishioner and hoped to use it as a lever for change within the church, Lily's attention is drawn to wealthy Dan Talbot, the vestry's conservative leader, whose 16-year-old son has disappeared. Although the novel frequently sags under the weight of its intricate plot, Blake's writing is graceful, often elegiac, and her characters hum with humanity. In addition, her examination of the divisive issues facing an influential religious organization in a fast-changing society gives a rich background to an entertaining mystery. (Sept.) FYI: Blake is married to novelist Dennis McFarland.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
