Unholy City
A Claire Codella Mystery
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Despite their rocky history, Detective Claire Codella and Precinct Detective Brian Haggerty come together when senior churchwarden Philip Graves’s bloody body is found lying in the herb garden of historic St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side just two days before Good Friday. Upon first glance, it looks like a random act of big city violence, but it soon becomes clear churchwarden Philip’s death was the result of a meticulously calculated ploy by someone who knew him.
There are five vestry members and a choir director in addition to the ten homeless men asleep in the church basement. Any one of them could have done it, but what did Philip Graves do to warrant such a merciless death? Struggling to share the case and salvage their personal relationship, Claire, Brian and trusted Detective Eduardo Muñoz work around the clock to uncloak the desires, secrets, and resentments that find home through the iron gates and into the hidden beauty of one historic Romanesque church in Unholy City, the haunting third installment in Carrie Smith’s Claire Codella mysteries.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The bludgeoning murder of senior church warden Philip Grave, found in the garden of St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Manhattan's Upper West Side, propels Smith's carefully plotted third Claire Codella mystery (after 2016's Forgotten City). When NYPD detectives Codella and Brian Haggerty arrive at the scene, just about everyone they talk to appears to be hiding something. The stakes rise with the subsequent discovery of the body of vestry secretary Emily Flounders in her car on the church grounds. The case soon spirals into a whirlwind of salacious secrets, and Codella and Haggerty are in the eye of the hurricane. Smith bolsters her seemingly straightforward procedural with well-developed characters: Codella is still recovering from a bout with cancer, and the case threatens her delicate relationship with Haggerty, with whom she's romantically involved. In addition, Smith sensitively portrays the plight of an intersex doctor, who was born "biologically male but with anatomy that would never look male." Readers will want to see more of the capable Codella.)
