FALSE TONGUES

A trip to her old college offers deacon Callie Anson (Deep Waters, 2009, etc.) both challenges and opportunities.

Callie hadn’t planned on attending Deacon’s Week, her alma mater’s conference for recent graduates. Her memories of Archbishop Temple House are sweet, but her breakup with her classmate Adam is just too recent and painful. Even her budding romance with Family Liaison Officer Mark Lombardi can’t take the sting out of her memories of Adam’s announcement shortly after their graduation that he’d be marrying parishioner Pippa instead of Callie. But Tamsin Howells swears that Adam isn’t coming to Deacon’s Week, and Callie would love to see Tamsin and her old friends Val Carver and Nicky Lamb. So she bundles off to Kings Cross station only to be bedeviled by weekend repairs on the District and Circle Lines—and finds when she finally arrives at Archbishop Temple that Adam has decided to come after all. Back home, Mark confronts his Italian family’s coolness toward his relationship with Callie and their determination to find him a nice Italian girl instead. At work, he’s involved in a heart-rending case: the stabbing death of Sebastian Frost, young, athletic and promising, the only child of Richard and Miranda Frost, a doctor and a surgeon. As Mark tries to guide the Frosts through the challenges of a police investigation they’d prefer was unnecessary, Callie confronts mysteries of her own: the mysteries of the human heart.

Callie has never been more appealing than in this sensitive exploration of love and loss.