Grave Misgivings

Kate Gallison returns with a new mystery featuring the irrepressible Mother Lavinia Grey, the cello-playing, crime-solving vicar of St. Bede's Episcopal Church in Fishersville, New Jersey. Mother Vinnie, as she is affectionately known to her close-knit congregation, is trying to cope with unscrupulous headstone-robbing thieves. And to think it all started so innocently, when former resident Mark Smith, with his grown daughter, Shannon, in tow, showed up in Fishersville - all the way from Phoenix, Arizona - with his mother's ashes. Gone since he was six, Mark now wants her remains to be buried near her husband's. The grave, they expect, is somewhere in town - at the cemetery of the Church of St. Joseph the Worker, with the beautiful view, or perhaps in the Mount Outlook Cemetery, peaceful and pretty. But there's no headstone to be found anywhere. Could it be that they're mistaken? Mark is plagued by headaches and haunting visions - memories, perhaps, of something terrible from long ago. Why are his father's remains nowhere to be found? Mother vinnie takes on the case of the missing remains with her usual equanimity and common sense. But there are additional complications. For one thing, there's the matter of the stolen statuary - all those missing angels and carved wreaths. And what about the mysterious bones buried under the Acme Supermarket ever since the great flood of 1955?