The Ordained
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In "The Lost Keats," Owen Keane was a young seminarian in rural Indiana whose encounter with murder, and his search for an unknown Keats sonnet, changed the path of his life forever. Now, twenty years later, Owen returns to Indiana for the parole hearing of the man he helped send to prison. Still haunted and restless, still in search of answers to the doubts that ended his dream of the priesthood, Keane is drawn into a mystery with a whimsical religious element.
The residents of the isolated town of Rapture, founded by an Adventist sect, the Ordained of God, are disappearing one by one. The Ordained believed that the world would end in 1844 and that they would be taken bodily into heaven. Now, one hundred and fifty years after their rapture failed to occur, something very similar is happening to their descendants.
Encouraged by a young doctor who has shut herself away in Rapture, and disarmed by the legend of the Ordained, Keane investigates and steps directly into the grasp of an implacable, murderous evil.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Itinerant sleuth Owen Keane's life has taken some abrupt turns in five previous novels (The Lost Keats, Deadstick, etc.), which have chronicled a believable life odyssey and delivered a handful of satisfying mysteries. He's lost his religious faith, his girl and most of his more loving impulses. Now Owen is in Indiana to testify at the parole hearing for convicted killer Curtis Morell--to make sure the parole doesn't happen. Owen runs into Morell's daughter Krystal, the local doctor in Rapture, a town founded by a religious sect which, a century and a half ago, held its breath for a Second Coming. Waiting in vain, most of the faithful remained in Rapture, devoting their lives to making ornately artistic coffins. Now, after an older woman and then a young man vanish, followed by Krystal herself, many see signs of urgent summonses from God. A local woman even claims to see lights in the sky. But the Rapture cops and Steve Fallon, a DEA official, have a more earthly explanation for the lights: drug planes are descending on Rapture. Is there a new kind of ecstasy to be found in this sleepy town? Without credentials, Owen functions on the fringe of the investigation. He talks to the chilling Morell and gets shot down flying shotgun in a small plane. He takes to Krystal and clashes with Fallon. He scoffs at the notion that aliens are flashing lights but accepts the dignity with which the believers once waited for their miracle of deliverance. He's an odd bird in an equally odd series, one that is consistently low-key, gently thoughtful and enlightening.
