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Fiction, Reviews

‘The Penitent Priest,’ by J.R. & Susan Mathis

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I suppose this will happen more and more as I grow old and fuzzy-brained, and the list of books I’ve read stretches longer than the unabridged dictionary. I picked up a set of the first three books in the Father Tom series for Kindle, only realizing toward the end of the first volume, The Penitent Priest, that I’d already read it. And reviewed it here. And forgotten it completely.

The Amazon page says this is a revised edition, so maybe the changes were extensive enough to mitigate my embarrassment. I note that my main concern with the book the first time through was the number of coincidences in the plot. I felt the same way this time, but it didn’t bother me as much. Perhaps that’s one of the problems they addressed in the revision.

In any case, Father Tom Greer is a Catholic priest in Pennsylvania. He came to his vocation late in life, following the murder of his wife in Myerton, the town where they lived. The crime has never been solved. Shortly thereafter Tom cut all local ties and left town, eventually attending seminary, getting ordained, and being put to work as an archivist.

But now (the book is narrated in the present tense, something I dislike on principle. Though I can’t say it actually decreased my enjoyment any) the archbishop has assigned him to fill in for the priest at St. Clare’s Church in Myerton. Then one day, in the confessional, someone tells Tom something that makes him believe they witnessed his wife’s murder, and might even be responsible. Then he gets a look at his late wife’s laptop, which a friend has been holding, and learns from her e-mails that she had a stalker. But when he tells the police detective in charge of the case, she says that’s not enough for her to take action on.

This encounter is complicated by the fact that the detective turns out to be a former girlfriend of Tom’s, one he nearly married before he met his wife.

What I liked about this book – the prose is excellent. The dialogue is natural, smart, and engaging. The characters are believable.

What I disliked (though not as much as on my first reading) — the number of coincidences in the plot. They interfered with my willing suspension of disbelief.

Still, considering that this is a “clean” novel, without profanity or sex and with excellent moral values, I was very impressed with The Penitent Priest. Our hyper-Protestant readers may not consider a Catholic novel a “Christian” work, but I think most any Christian can read this book and appreciate its values and even (for the most part) its theology.

So I recommend it, all things considered. I enjoyed reading The Penitent Priest. I think the authors have talent and good instincts.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Penitent Priest,’ by J. R. Mathis

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I probably wouldn’t have purchased J. R. Mathis’s mystery novel The Penitent Priest if I’d noticed that its tagline said “A Clean Murder Mystery.” (Puts me in mind of the old joke about “a nice old-fashioned murder with no immorality in it.”) When the first recommendation a book offers is its lack of dirty words and sex scenes, it’s not usually a guarantee of literary quality. But The Penitent Priest turned out better than I would have expected.

Father Tom Greer came to the priesthood late in life, after the murder of his beloved wife. So he’s somewhat nervous when the archbishop assigns him to temporarily replace the parish priest at St. Clare’s in Myerton, Pennsylvania. Myerton is where he lived as a married man and buried his wife, and where he abruptly left a number of old friends when he dropped out of sight afterwards. So he has some personal fences to mend.

But when an unseen stranger tells him secrets no innocent person should know in the confessional, Father Tom knows he has the opportunity to finally identify his wife’s killer. But he’ll also have to face his own fears and guilt.

I was impressed with the writing in The Penitent Priest. You rarely run into a novelist these days who can parse a decent English sentence and spell words right. The plotting, unfortunately, was less wonderful. As is not uncommon among starting authors, author Mathis has laid on too many coincidences. Why should the archbishop assign Father Tom to precisely this parish, considering his personal history and the fact that he’s still a person of interest in his wife’ murder? And is it really likely that the woman to whom Tom was engaged before he met his wife should show up as a police detective here?

Also, the big surprise at the end of the story might as well have been printed on the title page in big red letters.

But because I liked the writing, and because Father Tom is a good character, I bought the sequel.