Ocean State Libraries

Winner of the Arthur Ellis Award, Best First Novel

Father Brennan Burke is the main suspect in the murder of a young woman. Defense attorney Monty Collins steps up to defend him, but realizes the only way to exonerate him is to dive into the secrets of his past ...

Be careful what you wish for, his mother used to say. Yet how many times, in his twenty years defending the underprivileged, has Monty Collins wished for

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An English priest adrift in Scotland becomes the target of his own parish in this "nuanced, intense and complex [novel] . . . Read it twice" (Hilary Mantle, Guardian, UK).
"Always trust a stranger," said David's mother when he returned from Rome. "It's the people you know who let you down."
Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious...

"There are many rules a priest can't break. A priest cannot marry. A priest cannot abandon his flock. A priest cannot forsake his God. I've always been good at following rules. Until she came. Then I learned new rules." --

"After Father Michael Kavanagh sees a friend from his seminary days at the altar of his humble Inwood community parish, he wanders into the medieval haven of The Cloisters. In conversation with museum guide Rachel Vedette, he finds she retreated to the quiet of The Cloisters after her harrowing experience as a Jewish woman in France during the Holocaust. She shares with Kavanagh her late father's greatest intellectual work: a study demonstrating the...

Father John Rafferty is plunged into scandal when a young woman is murdered in his church.