A Circumstance of Blood - Jeannette Batz Cooperman.azw3

A chilling murder mystery


Father Colin McAvoy, a Scottish Jesuit priest, is the principal of the newly formed Matteo Academy.

With fifty students, the majority fee paying, he looks forward to being able to offer places to another fifty students whose parents are unable to pay.

Working on his staff is University friend Jimmy Cadigan, also a priest, and Father Francis Charron, an elderly priest, who had taught Colin at seminary school.

Charron’s brilliant, but he assisted at an exorcism as a young priest and has never recovered from the experience.

One of the academy’s students, 17-year-old Philip Grant, dresses like Oscar Wilde and hasn’t troubled to define his sexual orientation.

Irreverent and rebellious, he’s researching the private lives of the faculty for a video mashup.

He asks to borrow the Matteo Ricci map, a sixteenth century map which has been donated to the school.

Philip’s enough of a handful, but then Auxiliary Bishop Matthew Ehrlich arrives at the school to tell Colin that he has a new pupil for him.
The son of a local lawyer and psychologist, Graham Dennison has been accused of trying to kill his mother.

Colin tries to refuse; Ehrlich, conscious of the fundraising prospects, insists.

Miserable, Colin contacts his university friend Sarah Markham, a journalist who has just returned from Haiti.
Sarah moves in and starts to develop a profile of the young man.

She’s not convinced he’s violent at all.

And then one of the boys is found dead from a possible drugs overdose.

With her old friend panicking and other faculty members behaving strangely, Sarah starts to call in favours to get to bottom of the murder.

Was she wrong about Graham? Can she unravel the mystery swiftly enough to save Colin’s school?