DEATH GOES ON RETREAT
DEATH GOES ON RETREAT
by Sister Carol Anne O'Marie, Delacorte Press, ISBN# 385-31047-1 $21.95.
One of our favorite women novelists, and an actual Roman Catholic Sister, the author continues her cool, ironic and wise series of that supersleuth in black. Sister Mary Helen is on another murder case in the San Francisco Bay Area. We call this fine series of novels and their subgenre, "cozies with rosaries". It is refreshing to have the optimism and moral underpinnings of American Catholic literature reach out into the mystery form...especially when many mysteries novels these days have no moral underpinnings at all...many of the so-called woman's novels, in fact, are simple jingoist propaganda tracts dressed up with poisoned romance trimmings.
Critics and the marketplace tend to agree, the O'Marie books sell well and get good reviews. Though we wish there were more literary voices for a vertical liturgy in the Faith, we must admire the author's talent even though she believes in a fashionable mock-liberal horizontal liturgy. But, fashionable politics aside, she always tells a good story and advances the heart if not the substance of the beatitudes. Besides these novels are lots of fun and the lady narrator a courageous and tactful leader.
Sister Mary Helen and co-Sister Eileen, plagued with human frailties, (agedness, loss of memory and occasional cantankerous moods,) show up a week early for their annual retreat in the redwood mountains and discover they will have to stay at the lodge during a diocesan priests retreat.
Like all independent, hard-working, intellectual Northern Californian women, they decide to just kick back for a relaxing week of vacation...until a dead body is found.
Great dialogue, good and bad Catholics, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.