Day of Vengeance

July 21, 2014
In Dams’s captivating 15th Dorothy Martin mystery (after 2013’s Shadows of Death), Dorothy’s husband, retired chief constable Alan Nesbitt, is serving on the Crown Appointments Commission to select the next bishop of Sherebury Cathedral. When one of candidates, the Rev. Andrew Stephen Owen Brading, is murdered in his own church, everyone involved falls under suspicion, including Alan. An informal team gathers to clear Alan’s name by investigating each of the remaining candidates on the list. The stakes rise when a friend of the Martins goes missing after probing the cooked books of the charismatic Rev. Geoffrey Lovelace’s church. Meanwhile, the inquiry into Brading’s past opens questions as to why he was shortlisted for the mitre in the first place. Anglophiles, especially those with an ecclesiastical bent, will find much to savor. Agent: Kimberley Cameron, Kimberley Cameron Agency.

August 1, 2014
The Church of England has a major public relations problem when a candidate for bishop is murdered. The sleuthing duo of Dorothy Martin and Alan Nesbitt (Shadows of Death, 2014, etc.) become involved because Alan is on the committee charged with selecting the new bishop of their much-loved Sherebury Cathedral. Dorothy is an expat American with a talent for solving puzzles, her husband an ex-chief constable who finds himself on the list of suspects. The murdered man, archconservative Dean Brading, went through the customary vetting process, but when Dorothy and Alan start to dig deeper into his past, some decidedly insalubrious facts come to light. Because the three remaining candidates share an obvious motive, both the police and Dorothy and Alan visit them, all trying to catch a hint that any of them might want the job badly enough to kill. Their least favorite candidate, the Rev. Mr. Lovelace, is a charismatic speaker who leaves the real work of his post to his assistants. His lifestyle makes Dorothy and Alan suspicious enough to send their friend Walter to be part of his entourage as an undercover volunteer. Walter promptly vanishes. So does Lovelace, who surfaces only in death, a possible suicide. The couple's visits to the other two candidates reveal them as more promising bishops but less likely murderers. Although there is much debate in the church over candidates from such different ends of the ideological spectrum, Dorothy makes a breakthrough when she recalls Hercule Poirot's advice about seeking motives in the victim's personal life. Anglophile Dams adds another comfortable cozy to her collection of paeans to all things British.

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August 1, 2014
Who's killing clergymen in Britain? Amateur sleuth Dorothy Martin, the retired American schoolteacher who calls the cathedral town of Sherebury home, would like to know; and her husband, retired Chief Constable Alan Nesbitt, would also like to know, since he could be one of the murder suspects. It seems obvious that the murders are connected to the victims' names being on the short list for appointment to the bishopric of Sherebury Cathedral (Alan is involved with the selection process), but could there be something else at play? Dams sticks to the venerable Agatha Christie formulamurders, a flock of suspects, an engaging village settingbut there's nothing wrong with sticking to a formula when the formula produces results as splendid as these. With the Martin series and the unrelated-but-similar Hilda Johansson series, Dams has become one of the top practitioners of amateur-sleuth cozies. Longtime fans will already be lining up for this new title, and first-time readers will almost certainly want to start playing catch-up with the author's earlier books.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)