Pete Banning was Clanton's favorite son, a returning war hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning in 1946. he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell. As if the murder wasn't shocking enough, it was even more baffling that Pete's only statement about it - to the sheriff, to his...

Depressed after being humiliated and abandoned by the two men in her life, Agatha Raisin finds a new prospect in curate Tristan Delon, whose untimely death prompts Agatha to investigate strange mysteries surrounding the victim.

It's hot. The snow is gone, the ice is gone -- winter is long forgotten. When the phone wakes Phil Broker at five a.m. on the morning of his forty-eighth birthday -- six months removed from his surviving a January cold snap that (in Absolute Zero) nearly claimed his life -- it's already ninety-two degrees. It's July, and Stillwater, Minnesota, finds itself in the middle of the worst heat wave in local memory. The news on the phone has nothing...

Award winning author Julia Spencer-Fleming does it again in this third mystery featuring Rev. Clare Fergusson and Sheriff Russ Van Alstyne in the small town of Millers Kill, N.Y. As the small town's gossip increasingly speculates about the Rev.'s ambigous relationship with the married Sheriff, a more urgent problem is the disappearance of the doctor of Millers Kill's free clinic, a town institution with roots in events from the 20s and 30s. Digging...

Father Dowling, respected by all, is well-known for being willing to lend a helping hand whenever he can. So it's no surprise when Stanley Collins shows up at the St. Hilary rectory to confide in Father Dowling about the troubled marriage of one of the church's parishioners. Dowling promises to do his best to find a way to help, but it soon becomes too late. One of the parties involved is viciously killed in a hit and run car accident. Is it murder?...

Depicting a 16th-century Spain rife with zealotry and Machiavellian scheming, Carr's fiction debut is a satisfying effort. Carr (Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain) is an expert on the region's history of religious tensions and puts that knowledge to good use here. The novel begins with the gruesome murder of a lecherous priest in Aragon, a mountainous territory in northeastern Spain. Though the inhabitants of Aragon "like to run their affairs...

"For decades, the unsolved murder of Father Michael Leary has haunted Billings, Montana, the community he served. Who summoned the priest late one autumn night, then left his body in a sandstone gully for the ravens and other wild scavengers? And it's haunted no one more than Lindsay Keller, who admired and confided in him as a teenager. Compelled by his example to work for justice, she became a prosecutor. But after a devastating case left her shattered,...