Tag Archives: Father Brown

The Lake Superior Mysteries, by Tom Hilpert

If Chesterton’s Father Brown had been a Protestant, and in better shape, and a man of action, he might have been something like Pastor Jonah Borden, hero of three enjoyable novels (to date) by Tom Hilpert.

Pastor Borden serves the parish of Harbor Lutheran Church in Grand Lake (a stand-in, I assume, for Grand Marais), Minnesota, on the North Shore of Lake Superior. He is a widower, a gourmet cook, a coffee addict, and a martial artist. He once killed a man in self-defense. He holds court a couple evenings a week at a local tavern, where he listens to people’s problems while sipping soft drinks.

In the first book in the series, Superior Justice, one of Jonah’s parishioners is arrested for the murder of the child molester who killed his daughter. Under the seal of the confessional, the accused man gives Jonah a rock-solid alibi, but it’s an alibi he wants to keep secret. In order to clear him, Jonah has to identify the real killer. Along the way he begins a romance with Leyla Bennett, a beautiful TV news reporter. Continue reading The Lake Superior Mysteries, by Tom Hilpert

Suing Father Brown

Here’s an odd, and somewhat troubling, story from my own state.

It seems a boy was killed in 1957 in what appeared to be a car accident. Years later, a priest investigated the matter and decided the boy had in fact been murdered. He wrote a book that claimed to prove his theory, substituting fictional names for the real characters he blamed for the death.

Problem was, it was set in such a small community that the fictionalized characters were easily identifiable.

So the people the characters were based on sued the priest. They have now won a settlement out of court.

I guess that without a judgment, this doesn’t create a legal precedent, but it’s bad news for authors. It should be noted that just changing a person’s name and giving him a different hair color doesn’t necessarily protect you from a libel suit.

I’ve never heard of this book. I doubt it was a bestseller, so there can’t have been a lot of royalty money in the pot. I suppose the priest’s order ended up paying the lion’s share of the settlement.

That must be frustrating. This time (for a change) the priest wasn’t even accused of the crime.