Mystery, thrills and suspense from contemporary Catholic writers

Posted by -
I was sorting through a bunch of goodies that I picked up last August at the combined Catholic Writers Guild/New Media/Marketing Network conference and thought I would pass them on to you, before I "file" them (you know what that means). Among other things, I nabbed a number of marketing cards for novels written by members of the Catholic Writers Guild, and I thought I would commend these books to your consideration (even though I have not read most of them). A few that don't get mentioned here will be noted over on my Catholic Science Fiction blog. Today, I thought I would focus on suspense and mystery titles. Here goes:

Unbridled Grace by Michael J. Norman
Unbridled Grace: A True Story about the Power of Choice, by Michael J. Norman. This one actually is not fiction, but fact. The author is a chiropractor from right here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, whose true story sounds like a best-selling thriller. Dr. Norman got dragged into a rats' nest of intrigue when he unknowingly got involved with a Russian money-laundering ring under investigation by the FBI. The book's web site describes the story this way:
Unbridled Grace is the true story of how one man rises from the forces of evil through his renewed faith in Christ and takes the reader on a journey to redemption through the bold use of our power of choice for God. Along the way, Michael meets a dynamic Catholic parish priest who gives him the courage to forge a path through this crisis and a hard-working attorney who joins him in this monumental battle. Will their efforts be enough to free the author and his family from this nightmare? It is at this time that a series of seemingly miraculous occurrences begin and the reader is shown what courage, faith and the power of heartfelt prayer can bring to all of our lives when all else appears hopeless.
Murder in The Vatican: The Church Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, by Ann Margaret Lewis, with some charming illustrations by Rikki Niehaus. I am really sorry my book-buying budget is so non-existent these days, because I would really love to read this book. As you can see, the author cashes in on the current popular trend of extending the literary lives of great characters from out-of-copyright books of the past. Who could resist a book in which Sherlock Holmes gets to sleuth for Pope Leo XIII? Here's the blurb:
Follow the great Sherlock Holmes as he investigates three baffling cases at the "express desire of his Holiness, the Pope." Stories include "The Death of Cardinal Tosca," "The Vatican Cameos," and "The Second Coptic Patriarch."
You'll encounter baffling crimes, rich, historical settings, and a fateful encounter with Father Brown!
These thrilling tales of murder and intrigue vividly bring to life three of Watson's "untold tales!"
Viper, by John Desjarlais, sports the tagline, "Who is stronger, the serpent or the virgin?" This the second mystery featuring Latina sleuth, Selena de la Cruz, a former DEA agent turned insurance investigator.
Selena De La Cruz has a problem. Just before All Souls' Day someone entered the names of nine people in her church's Book of the Dead, seeking prayers for their souls.
The problem?
All nine are still alive. Until they start getting murdered . . . one by one . . . in the precise order their names were entered in the Book of the Dead . . . and always right after a local visionary sees a mysterious woman known as The Blue Lady.
Is she the Virgin Mary warning the next victim? Lady Death, the Aztec goddess, come to claim another soul? Or someone less mystical, but deadly nonetheless?
Selena doesn't know but had better find out: only a few souls on that list have not yet been murdered, and the last name on it is . . . Selena De La Cruz.
The Soul Reader: A Novel of Suspense, by Gerard D. Webster. This novel is a sequel but, according to reader reviews, can be read as a stand-alone tale. (Don't you love it when you fall in love with a story and then discover there is more where that came from?) Apparently, in the first book, the protagonist lost his eyesight but gained the ability to see into people's souls (whence the title of this book).
It is a year after his father's murder when Carrie Hope asks Ward to assist her in writing a book about the North Beach Project, the money-laundering scheme that led to his father's death. Ward initially turns her down. ... But when Carrie decides to pursue the investigation without him, Ward is faced with a difficult choice: he can allow her to go it alone and possibly get killed . . . or he can join her in hopes of being able to protect her. Ward's uncanny insight might give him an edge-and allow him to see the evil coiled ...
Although I haven't read any of these books, they all sound like things I'd enjoy and, judging by the great reviews they get on Amazon, they are intriguing tales that embody Catholic values and themes, so I don't hesitate to bring them to your attention. If you have read any of them, please leave a comment below and let us know what you think!

©2013 Lisa A. Nicholas

Please leave your thoughts or comments below!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Grace and Purification in Flannery O'Connor's “Revelation”

Posted by -
Image
A recent comment on an old post about Flannery O'Connor raises some questions that I thought I would respond to in a separate post, rather than depositing them in the obscurity of the comm box. Janet Baker left a long comment (you can read it in its entirety there), which says in part: I'm currently working on the short story Revelation, looking at the text for what it says about Flannery's Catholicism, rather than listening to her pronouncements in non-fiction, like her letters. If you read the story, you will note that it is Mrs. Turpin's virtues that must be burned away before she enters heaven, and that people enter heaven in groups, racial and social. Perhaps you don't read either St. Thomas Aquinas, or Teilhard de Chardin, nor have I extensively, but if you begin to read about it, you'll see that St. Thomas promotes the virtues of which Mrs. Turpin is guilty--generous almsgiving, supporting the Church, helping others regardless of their worthines...
Keep reading »

The Story of the Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh

Posted by -
Image
Today we come to the second part of our examination of the story of the Great Flood found in the Epic of Gilgamesh — wherein we will look at the story itself . I'm actually going to break this into two separate posts, a summary of the story and the interpretation of it, which I'll combine with an examination of the story's significance. Before I do that, however, let's recap what we've already covered in Part 1 . Last time, in the first step, the rhetorical analysis, we noted that the Flood account is really a story-within-a-story, which means we need to consider it along with the larger story that contains it. This narrative technique is sometimes called a “ frame tale ,” a term that is very appropriate in this case because the story of Gilgamesh provides the frame (context) for the part we're most interested in, and the Flood story is what gets framed (the focus of our attention). Still, although we are most interested in the Flood account, the relation...
Keep reading »

Reading and the Moral Imagination: Plato and truth in fiction

Posted by -
Image
Nota Bene: I originally published this post back in 2012, and it has been one of the most-read posts on this blog ever since. In fact, it sums up pretty well my defense of the necessity of literature — an apologia pro literatura , if you will. For this reason, I’ve decided to pin it here to the top of the blog, so that anyone who stumbles on this site accidentally will know what I’m on about. If you want to know more, try reading some of the other articles in the “popular posts” list that you’ll find in the sidebar to the right. Welcome, and don’t feel shy about leaving comments. I respond to all comments on this blog (which is how I happened to write my most popular post of all time ). Some time ago, I lamented the fact that people — even allegedly “educated” people — these days are reading less and less; and I began to explore the question of why this fact should alarm us. Isn't reading just one of many ways to amuse ourselves in idle moments? Why should reading novels, say,...
Keep reading »

Rerum Novarum in context

Posted by -
Image
Res novae Pope Leo XIII wrote his encyclical Rerum Novarum at the end of the nineteenth century. The previous hundred years had seen a huge upheaval in the way people in the Western world lived and thought. Some changes happened so fast that, even after a hundred years, the world hadn’t yet figured out how to deal adequately with situations that were already a fact of life. One proposed “solution” to the problems of the Western world was set forth in The Communist Manifesto , written by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, but as Pope Leo saw clearly, not only didn’t the Marxist solution fix anything, it only made things worse. That’s the main reason the Holy Father wrote Rerum Novarum , which is perhaps the first papal encyclical that found widespread resonance outside the Catholic Church. Linguistic context: The title Before we look more closely at the social, political, and religious context in which this encyclical letter was written, I’d like to say something about its titl...
Keep reading »

Moral Imagination: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness

Posted by -
Image
Recently I wrote about literature as being capable of conveying, and even discovering, truth, which can be called “poetic knowledge.” Both Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas upheld a similar view, Aristotle by demonstrating that poetry is “more philosophical” (i.e., more capable of demonstrating truth) than history, and St Thomas acknowledging poetry as a kind of “science” ( scientia ) or knowledge, albeit a lower form of knowledge than philosophy because it relies more on imagination than intellect. Today I’d like to consider the value of beauty, an abstract value, but one that we often associate with poetry, as well as music and the fine arts. Beauty lifts us up My thoughts are prompted by this interesting feature article from the National Catholic Register, “True Beauty Satisfies the Human Heart,” an interview by Trent Beattie of psychologist Margaret Laracy, who identifies beauty as a kind of knowledge. Laracy has made a study of the healing effects of beauty on thos...
Keep reading »

Epic poetry and the moral imagination

Posted by -
Image
This fall I’ve been teaching a course on Medieval Epic Poetry, a continuation of the Ancient Epic course I taught last spring, in which we read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Vergil’s Aeneid , poems that are all deeply grounded in a pagan worldview but which nonetheless examine human nature, and particularly human excellence, in such an authentic way that they continue to speak profoundly to readers in our own day. Still, the pagan world that produced those works valued things that sometimes run counter to Christian values, so their heroes may seem strange and not entirely admirable to a modern Christian. Nonetheless, all the poems we read in the Medieval Epic course are written by Christian poets who have, to one extent or another, appropriated the epic tradition and made it their own. What does it mean to be a hero? Achilles was famous for his godlike rage. This shows, on the one hand, the powerful appeal of the epic form and, on the other hand, the way Christians have...
Keep reading »