Enjoy this Contemporary Small Town Sleuthing Couple Cold Case Murder Mystery In his limited spare time, Father Tom has been working on transcribing the diary and letters of Father Liam O'Connor, who served as Saint Clare's pastor in the late 1920s and early 1930s, preparatory to writing a biography of his predecessor. At Anna's not-so-gentle urging, he gives a talk on his research to the monthly meeting of the Myer County Historical Society, mentioning that the young priest died suddenly in his sleep. After his talk, Father Tom is approached by Esther Beasley, an elderly member of both Saint Clare's and the historical society. She claims that her grandmother worked as Father O'Connor's housekeeper and took a bottle from his bedside table containing the last thing the priest drank before he died. He also asks if she can meet with Father Tom soon, since she has something important to tell him.But before Tom can meet with Mrs. Beasley, she's found dead in her home, the victim of an apparent robbery-gone-wrong. Strangely enough, the only thing stolen was Father Liam's bottle. The missing bottle is odd, but then Mrs. Beasley's daughter mentions an old family story to Father Tom. According to it, Father Liam didn't die in his sleep of natural causes. Tom comes to believe her death is related to the missing bottle, but Helen's unconvinced. Then someone breaks into the Rectory and steals Father O'Connor's papers and Father Tom's laptop . . .The Priest's Pen is the twenty-first novel in The Mercy and Justice Mysteries, a contemporary small town mystery series. The series is a sequel to The Father Tom Mysteries that began with The Penitent Priest and includes the same cast of characters. It features Father Tom Greer, a Catholic Priest who is also an amateur sleuth in the tradition of Father Brown, and his wife Helen Greer, female Chief of Police and detective in the tradition of Kinsey Millhone. Susan Mathis was born in and grew up in an extremely small town in Alachua County, Florida where her family has lived for more than 100 years. When Susan was still very young, James (J.R) Mathis was born in a somewhat bigger small town about 100 miles south of where she lived. Within a decade, James' small town would become part of Orlando, the biggest tourist destination in the United States. He was not amused. That is how, while Susan was running barefoot, swimming in lakes full of alligators and feeding chickens, James was sitting in his bedroom reading books faster than his father could bring them home from the library.
Were James and Susan to write their love story, it would definitely be an enemies-to-lovers trope. They met in the library where he was working. He found her demands for books that he had to pull and bring to her so unreasonable that he actually turned her into the head librarian. She in turn was so anxious to drive him away that when some friends secretly set them up she laid out an entire speech about how miserable her life was (she is typically very upbeat). Little did she suspect that he had a passionate attraction to misery and they were married just over a year later.
Fast forward 26 years, three children, four grandchildren and 20 years of James working for the Federal government. He was diagnosed with a highly treatable but still very scary form of cancer. As so often happens, this brush with mortality inspired him to do something he'd always wanted to do, write a novel. After the publication of the second Father Tom Mystery, Susan joined him as coauthor. As far as the Mathises are concerned, writing together is the most fun a couple can have sitting at a computer.
