The Mysteries of Reverend Dean »

The young man lowered his voice, but sounded all the more intense for doing so. "Reverend," he said solemnly, "if God didn't do it, then it doesn't make any logical sense."

"Oh, it makes perfect sense," the reverend replied. "It makes perfect, horrible sense." * * *

The Reverend Thaddeus Dean has just retired as pastor of a small church at the foot of the Cascade Mountains. He is lonely, poor and desperately misses his wife who died years ago. Fortunately, he has a pastime. He solves murders that are so bizarre as to seem impossible.

In each of the stories collected in this volume, Reverend Dean is challenged by a seemingly "impossible" crime. In one story, a pastor dies in front of his congregation when God appears in church and predicts his death. In another tale, three siblings are murdered - one on a sandy beach, one surrounded by wet paint and one in the middle of a mudflat - with no footprints near any of the bodies. In a third story, a woman is stabbed in her triple-locked, upper floor apartment - although she is protected by a guard dog, and three witnesses insist that no one entered or left her unit.

But those are only half the stories. Reverend Dean also investigates a suspicious suicide on a Caribbean cruise, a body that appears out of thin air in a locked garage, and a murderous shooter who disappears from an apartment surrounded by the police. Readers won't just have to guess who the criminals are, they'll have to guess how they committed their crimes.

Harking back to the stories of John Dickson Carr, Hal White has created a brilliant yet endearing sleuth who not only investigates crimes that seem insoluble, but crimes that appear impossible. But theseare not supernatural stories - they are classic mysteries. And they'll leave mystery fans wanting more of Reverend Dean.

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Advance praise for the stories in The Mysteries of Reverend Dean: "I very much enjoyed them... May I be among the first (of many, I trust) to put in an advance order for the book." BOB ADEY, author of Locked Room Murders, and co-editor of Murder Impossible and Death Locked In.

Publishers Weekly

White successfully creates a modern-day Father Brown in this outstanding collection of six impossible crime tales that fans of classic puzzles will hope is but the first of many. The Rev. Thaddeus Dean, a widower recently retired from his position at Outpost Community Church near the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, finds himself confronted with challenges that would have been welcomed by Henry Merrivale and Gideon Fell. For example, in the opening tale, "Murder at an Island Mansion," a man's death is followed by a series of ghostly crimes aimed at his heirs, ostensibly to prevent them from selling the family home, including a murder committed by someone who escaped without leaving a footprint on the freshly-painted floor. Effortlessly crafting intriguing situations, the author matches the premises with satisfying solutions while gently and unintrusively weaving questions of faith into the plot lines.
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