Callie Anson is a very new curate newly ordained, recently broken up with her fiancé and now facing her first posting. Already anxious, it doesn’t help to learn that her fiancé, also a new ordinand, works in a neighboring parish. Plus the wife of the senior priest sees her as a threat and immediately dislikes her.

All these vexations dissolve when Callie and other women priests are treated rudely by the more conservative clerics at an area meeting. Her friend and mentor, Frances Cherry, introduces her to the highly charismatic Leo Jackson, a black priest who led the fight for women’s ordination and urged Frances to seek ordination. Now one of her closest friends, they have shared many confidences one of which will have horrible consequences.

Only hours after the bitter confrontation between the two camps, Jonah Adimola one of the most outspoken conservatives is found strangled in Fr. Jackson’s church with Frances’ stole around his neck. Was he murdered because of his views on women’s ordination? As the noose tightens around her Frances is willing to go to jail rather than betray another’s secret even when she is endangered. When Jackson is named as bishop the stakes are higher.

Meanwhile, Callie accompanies the senior priest on his visits and is rebuffed for her sex several times. Her former fiancé presses her to meet his new fiancée and her gay brother drops by for tea and sympathy. Her mother considers her daughter’s vocation merely a passing phase and refuses to listen to any comments about it. There is Mark Lombardi a local police officer she met while they were both vacationing in Venice whose attentions seem to drive away thoughts of her previous engagement and provide the necessary official connection for the plot.

Not so much a mystery as a look at how those in glass houses comport themselves this book has believable and very human characters; clergy also suffers from temptation to the seven deadly sins. Gay rights, gender rights, or pride, envy, and avarice are just as much on the minds of clergy as laity and Kate Charles once again tells a tale well.

--Jane Davis