About This Book
Likable, 30-ish Frances Finn, a PI who inherited her father's Kansas City detective agency, makes her uneven but promising debut in this mystery set in a convent high school. Frances is called back to her alma mater by aged Mother Superior Celeste, who is dying-as is the order of St. Adelaide's and its once bustling outpost in Braddock, Kans. Informing Frances that the accidental death, 30 years before, of Sister Barbara Ross, was no accident, Mother Celeste asks her former student to oversee a meeting at which, it soon appears, Sister Sharon, Frances's old friend and now acting Mother Superior, will be implicated as a murderer. As Frances delves into long-ago events, probing Barbara Ross' dysfunctional family, still a potent force in Braddock, and Mother Celeste's own local connections, she uncovers a chain of misdeeds that lead to a present-day murder and threaten her own life. Repetitious details of convent routines, old and new, slow an already fussy plot. The prose is often flat-footed and primer-like, but there are enough interesting angles to keep this first novel readable, if unriveting.
