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Enjoy this Small-Town Murder Mystery Featuring A Unique Sleuthing Couple

It's an eventful October for Father Tom and Helen. It begins with the wedding of Father Tom's mother Nola to her fiance, former strip club owner Stu Landry. The two septuagenarian newlyweds have no sooner embarked on their honeymoon than Saint Clare's Parish plays host to the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore Walter Knowland, making his periodic visit.

It should be a welcome homecoming for the Cardinal, who spent his high school years in Myerton. But there's a cloud hovering over the visit. A special state grand jury issued a report, documenting decades of sexual abuse in the Archdiocese. While the report makes clear that the Archdiocese under Cardinal Knowland has mended its ways, he's bearing the brunt of the criticism. He's also received death threats. With this in mind, Helen assigns her newest officer Gwen Tolson-who also happens to be the Cardinal's granddaughter-to his security detail.

During a tour of the Unclaimed Blessings Thrift Store, a large urn falls from a loft, narrowly missing the Cardinal and injuring Gwen. That combined with the firebombing of the Archbishop's Residence in Baltimore convinces Helen that he's in danger. She begins to hunt for the person responsible.

But then an elderly volunteer at the thrift store, Eliza Ross, is murdered. At first it looks like a robbery gone wrong. But it's soon clear to Helen that someone staged the scene to make it look like a robbery. This raises two questions: who'd want to kill her, and why?

In the midst of all this, Gladys goes into labor early . . . and one of the triplets may not make it . . .

The Cardinal's Clock is the fourteenth 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.