The Redemptive Return: A Contemporary Small Town Amateur Sleuth Murder Mystery
About this ebook
My faith lies in tatters after the events of the summer. I’ve neglected my prayers. I’ve avoided my priestly duties.
I am questioning everything about myself--except my feelings for Helen.
When my estranged sister goes missing, I fly home to look for her--with Helen surprising me on the plane.
My sister’s dead when I arrive. I’m too late to save her. But I swear to find her killer.
But emotions are fragile things, and in the depths of my despair, my love for Helen bursts forth in a grief fueled frenzy of passion and longing.
In coming home, what have I found--my damnation, or my redemption?
The Redemptive Return is the third book in The Father Tom Mysteries series, a contemporary small town mystery series. It features Father Tom Greer, a Catholic Priest who is also an amateur sleuth in the tradition of Father Brown. If you enjoy the works of Rhys Dylan, Andrew Mayne, and Mary Stone, you will enjoy this novel.
About the author
Susan Mathis was born in and grew up in an extremely small town in Alachua County, Florida where her family has lived for more than 100 years. When Susan was still very young, James (J.R) Mathis was born in a somewhat bigger small town about 100 miles south of where she lived. Within a decade, James' small town would become part of Orlando, the biggest tourist destination in the United States. He was not amused. That is how, while Susan was running barefoot, swimming in lakes full of alligators and feeding chickens, James was sitting in his bedroom reading books faster than his father could bring them home from the library.
Were James and Susan to write their love story, it would definitely be an enemies-to-lovers trope. They met in the library where he was working. He found her demands for books that he had to pull and bring to her so unreasonable that he actually turned her into the head librarian. She in turn was so anxious to drive him away that when some friends secretly set them up she laid out an entire speech about how miserable her life was (she is typically very upbeat). Little did she suspect that he had a passionate attraction to misery and they were married just over a year later.
Fast forward 26 years, three children, four grandchildren and 20 years of James working for the Federal government. He was diagnosed with a highly treatable but still very scary form of cancer. As so often happens, this brush with mortality inspired him to do something he’d always wanted to do, write a novel. After the publication of the second Father Tom Mystery, Susan joined him as coauthor. As far as the Mathises are concerned, writing together is the most fun a couple can have sitting at a computer.
