Cecilian Vespers
by Anne Emery
Lawyer and bluesman Monty Collins is used to defending murderers - and occasionally investigating murders himself - but he's never come up against anything like the case of Reinhold Schellenberg, a world-renowned German theologian who has been found dead on the altar of an old church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Saint Cecilia's day. The controversial priest, once a top insider in the Vatican, was known to provoke strong feelings in Catholics of all ideological stripes, and�now those feelings have overflowed with horrifying results. At least Monty knows where to look for clues; his friend Father Brennan Burke has just opened a choir school at the church, and the students provide an international cast of suspects - including a flamboyant Sicilian priest, an eccentric English monk, a disgruntled American, a Vatican enforcer, a church lady with a history of violence, and, most perplexing of all, a police officer from the former East Berlin.