In the bleak midwinter - Julia Spencer-Fleming

In the bleak midwinter -Spencer-Fleming, Julia

Summary: Clare Fergusson, the first female priest of an Episcopal church in Millers Kill, New York, finds herself immersed in murder when a newbown baby is abandoned and a young mother is brutally slain, forcing her to dig deeply into the town's secrets. - (Baker & Taylor)

Kirkus Reviews
This winner of the 2001 Malice Domestic Award for Best First Traditional Mystery is actually something of a hybrid. Rev. Clare Fergusson, the new Episcopal priest at St. Alban's, rather improbably talks police chief Russ Van Alstyne, in the upstate New York town of Millers Kill, into riding one of his patrol shifts with him. And it's together that halfway in the shallow Kill in Payson's Park they find the body of Katie McWhorter, bashed and dead of hypothermia, who'd just left her newborn baby outside St. Alban's with a note asking that childless law partners Geoffrey and Karen Burns be named his adoptive parents. There's nothing cozy about Russ Van Alstyne except for his obvious admiration for the woman who's landed in the middle of his murder investigation. And even Clare Fergusson isn't exactly what you'd expect from a country priest: Like Russ, she's an army veteran, a helicopter pilot whose military training will come in very handy when she's lured into a snowy ambush and separated from her laughably vulnerable MG (the Had-I-But-Known side of this debut) but turns the tables on her armed assailant (the kick-ass side).Without ever slighting the central situation of the abandoned mother and her abandoned child, Spencer-Fleming shows admirable resourcefulness in the changes she rings on it. Even so, nothing that happens here-certainly no impression made by the stock suspects-upstages that staple of the neo-conventional mystery, the unconsummated romance between the amateur sleuth and the loyal cop, whose convenient wife remains strategically offstage throughout. Copyright Kirkus 2001 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Check Availability

Marriage and other acts of charity - Kate Braestrup

Marriage and other acts of charity - Braestrup, Kate

Summary: As a minister, Kate Braestrup regularly performs weddings. She has also, at 44, been married twice and widowed once, and accordingly has much to say about life after "the ceremony." From helping a newlywed couple make amends after their first fight to preparing herself for her second marriage, Braestrup offers her insights and experiences on what it truly means to share your life with someone, from the first kiss to the last straw, for better or for worse.

Publishers Weekly Reviews
In this breezy, soft-pedaling exercise in spiritual empowerment, Braestrup (Here If You Need Me) shares some of her hard-won marital wisdom. As an ordained minister, Braestrup counsels couples to love and cherish one another, even in the face of a 50% divorce rate, and asserts that of the three kinds of love known in ancient biblical Greek—eros, philos, and agape—the greatest is the last. Translated into Latin as charitas, agape is the generous, selfless love given unconditionally and best mimics the nature of God's love. Braestrup traces her own call to the ministry to the aftermath of the shocking sudden death of her policeman husband, Drew, killed in a car accident in 1996, when her family and friends rallied around her and the couple's four children with abundant love and care. She reveals that not long before his death, the couple had suffered a marital crisis and sought counseling for what the author considered clearly Drew's "incurable character disorder"; however, she was jolted from the brink by the thought of their losing each other. Employing examples of the couples she knows, such as game warden Jeremy Judd and his betrothed, town dispatcher Melanie, who sought the author's advice as they embarked on their marriage, as well as a soon-to-be-divorced couple, Jesse and Georgiana, Braestrup offers grains of folksy, charitable wisdom. She is comfortable discussing death ("One hundred percent of marriages end"), declaring that the only recourse is Jesus' message: "Love more." (Jan.)
[Page 44]. Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

Check Availability