THE ORDAINED

Rapture, Indiana, got its name from the millennialist prophets who planned to use it as their point of departure for the world's end. But now, 150 years after the Ordained of God were disappointed, it seems as if the rapture may finally have arrived after all. Dr. Krystal Bowden, the grown-up daughter of Curtis Morell, the remorseless killer seminarian-turned-shamus Owen Keane helped to lock up in The Lost Keats (1993), wants Owen to come out to Rapture to investigate the disappearance of elderly herbalist Prestina Shipe, evidently carried off in the middle of her breakfast. Even in the brief time Owen spends among the farms and herbs and handmade coffins that are Rapture's current stock-in-trade, there's a second disappearance, and then, while Owen's back is turned, a third—Krystal herself. Did she take off to avoid prosecution along with the rest of the methamphetamine ring her highly suspicious lover, DEA agent Steve Fallon, is tracking? Were the disappearances a case of alien abduction, as ufologist Marietta Feasey gravely tells Owen? Or is Curtis Morell, safely locked away in a Michigan City prison, somehow behind it all? Short, stark, and sparsely peopled with angularly fascinating figures: Faherty's portrait of Rapture has all the fine black-and-white detail you'd expect from a mid-century daguerreotype.