Book Review: To Darkness and to Death

Reviewed By: Catherine Thompson - RAM

To Darkness and to Death     Amazon US HC Amazon Canada HC
Julia Spencer-Fleming
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Religious Fiction   Woman Main Character   Police Procedural   Thriller
Series: Clare Ferguson # 4

The Reverend Clare Fergusson, Episcopal priest in the small Adirondack town of Millers Kill, is woken very early one Saturday morning by the ringing of her telephone. The local search-and-rescue team is one volunteer short in their search for Millie van der Hoeven, and team leader John Huggins has reached the bottom of his list. So Clare hurries out to Haudenosaunee, the 250-acre holding of the van der Hoeven family that’s about to be turned over a conservation group.

Meanwhile, police chief Russ van Alstyne expects to spend his fiftieth birthday hunting. That’s before he’s called in on the assault of Becky Castle, a young woman beaten and left for dead on a logging road on the van der Hoeven property. The assault on Becky Castle and Millie van der Hoeven’s disappearance don’t seem to be linked at first, but small towns have a way of breeding connections, even in crime.

I’d heard a lot of good things about Spencer-Fleming’s work. And I suppose some of them hold true. She’s got some very good characters, especially in her central characters Clare and Russ, who are drawn together by mutual attraction yet held at arm’s-length from each other by vows: hers to the church, and his to his wife.

But though it says “mystery” on the cover, this book was nothing so much as a collection of coincidences. There were crimes committed, but the solution was more dumb luck than anything resembling an investigation. Granted, that’s how life works, but this isn’t life: it’s fiction. I found the book slow-moving—much slower than I’d expected. Still, the good points outweigh the bad.

Catherine Thompson - RAM

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Catherine Thompson - RAM