Here’s something truly unique! Do you love mystery, suspense, thrillers, with some romance and a unique, thoughtful detective?Then John Jordan is for you and you’ll love Michael Lister’s “BLOOD” SERIES beginning with POWER IN THE BLOOD.”Michael Lister may be the author of the most unique series running in mystery fiction. It crackles with tension and authenticity”, Michael Connelly. ˃˃˃ BODY AND … authenticity”, Michael Connelly.
˃˃˃ BODY AND THE BLOOD John Jordan book 4 from multi-award-winning and bestselling author Michael Lister
Koryta says, “If you like crime writing with depth, suspense, and sterling prose, you should be reading Michael Lister.”
It’s known as the Protective Management Unit. It’s a closed society within a closed society, housing Florida state inmates who wouldn’t survive in open population at Potter Correctional Institution. In it, John Jordan witnesses the most baffling crime of his career—a seemingly impossible murder he would swear could not have happened had he not seen it with his own eyes.
John has come to the PM unit because of a note he received announcing a murder would take place during the Catholic Mass. As he observes the priest offering up the body and the blood, an inmate enters the unit, walks over to his cell, and is locked inside alone. A little while later, John notices a pool of blood spreading out from beneath the cell door. The inmate is dead, his body and his blood separated from one another.
The inmate, a talented artist and quite possibly an innocent man, was sensitive and kind, just a few short days from parole. Who would want to kill him and why? Before John can answer these questions, he’s got to figure out how he was killed.
Suspects abound, including the Catholic Priest conducting the mass, the two PM officers, the victim’s sister, who visited him just prior to his death—something she hadn’t done in four years—and a handful of inmates, one of whom was the victim’s lover.
As the investigation proceeds, John uncovers crime after crime, and an openly racists family with plenty they aren’t open about. After taking a closer look at them, John’s best friend, Merrill Monroe, disappears.
Attempting to balance his fragile reconciliation with his ex-wife and the high-stakes investigation, John is soon overwhelmed and wonders if the life he’s hoped for is even possible. Just when he think’s he can’t take anymore, a second disappearance brings with it the demand for a dangerous prison break and a daring exchange. When John finally figures out how the crime was committed and who’s behind it, an exciting climax follows that reveals the shocking solution, sees someone close to John shot, and carries for John the ultimate personal price—one he’s not sure he can pay.
Lister writes lyrical, evocative prose, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy – Panama City News Herald.
Q&A with author Michael Lister.
How did chaplaincy work help you write fiction?
John Jordan and the “Blood” series wouldn’t exist had I not been a prison chaplain.
I wanted to write clerical detective mysteries from the moment I first happened upon a 1990 Avenel edition of Father Brown Crime Stories in a dusty old bookstore in Atlanta the year I graduated from seminary school and was ordained.
But as inspiring and influential as I found Father Brown and the ecclesiastical sleuths that followed him, particularly those penned by Andrew Greeley, I was far more influenced by hard-boiled writers like Robert B. Parker, James Lee Burke, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Michael Connelly, Graham Greene, Dennis Lehane, Ernest Hemingway, Walter Mosley, and Cormac McCarthy, and I knew that my clerical detective would be different. I would introduce a strong, tough, troubled clerical detective into the world of the hard-boiled detective novel. And that’s where prison chaplaincy came in.
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This book is about a prison chaplain who finds himself investigating a murder.
Love the characters
John Jordan is a man beset by conflicts, internal and external. An ex-cop, he’s currently the chaplain for the Pottersville Correctional Institution and a sometime investigator who is trying to reconcile his capacity for violence with his calling to pacific ministry. He’s experiencing a crisis of spirituality, if not exactly of faith. He has a tenuous relationship with his father and brother. He loves and has reunited with his wife Susan, from whom he had been separated, but is still in love with a co-worker, Anna Rodden, who is also married. Susan lives in Atlanta and loves city life; Jordan prefers the rural life he has in Florida. Where to live together has yet to be decided and could potentially be a source of friction, especially considering the surprise Susan has for him.
Jordan also has to deal with his father-in-law, Tom Daniels, the Inspector General of the Florida Department of Corrections. Like Jordan, Daniels is a recovering alcoholic. Unlike Jordan, who has been sober for quite a while, Daniels’ sobriety is very recent. It’s a kind of shocked sobriety, the result of his wife Sarah having been raped by Juan Martinez, a prisoner at the Pottersville Correctional Institution. It has become Daniels’ mission to put him away for the rest of his life. He’s feeling good about accomplishing this because he has found a witness, another prisoner named Justin Menge, who is willing to testify against Martinez.
When Jordan learns this, he’s taken aback because (when the novel opens) he’s just had a conversation with Menge’s sister Paula, who has visited her brother for the first time in the four years since he’s been incarcerated. Menge, Martinez and others are kept in G-Dorm in the Protective Management unit of the prison. PM is for inmates who are at risk from the general population, and G-Dorm is supposed to adhere to rigid security protocols.
Technically, Jordan’s workday is over and his time is his own, but he’s returning to the prison because of a flyer he’s received announcing a Catholic mass in the PM unit. The flyer is a doctored version of the one the priest distributed, and includes the words “A murder will take place.” He discovers that Tom Daniels is on-site, too, conducting interviews and taking depositions, and shows Daniels the flyer. The two return to G-Dorm, where those who are not attending the mass are locked in their cells. Shortly thereafter the mass begins. Jordan and Daniels chat with one of the correctional officers who oversees the unit, a slacker named Potter. During Holy Communion, Jordan notices blood seeping from under the door to Justin Menge’s cell. It can’t possibly have happened—the cell was locked and the unit under observation by Jordan, Daniels and Potter—but Justin Menge has been murdered.
There is no dearth of suspects. Besides Martinez himself, there are inmates who would commit murder for him. There is Chris Sobel, Menge’s boyfriend, and Paula Menge, who had visited her brother earlier. There is the priest, Father McFadden. During the course of his subsequent investigation, Jordan learns that an inmate named Mike Hawkins is in the PM unit. He’s the son of the racist, homophobic sheriff of Pine County. Paula Menge insists that her brother was set up for eventual incarceration by Sheriff Howard Hawkins, and that Justin was in fact innocent. Jordan later finds out that a prison psychologist, DeLisa Lopez, might be intimately involved with an inmate who is a suspect in the case. And then there are Potter and Pitts, the correctional officers whose laxity frequently leaves the PM unit vulnerable to problems.
Correctly guessing (rather than deducing) the identity of the murderer very early on didn’t diminish my enjoyment of THE BODY AND THE BLOOD. Michael Lister does a good job of weaving together the various storylines and, although what attracted me to the novel in the first place was the locked-room puzzle, what ultimately proved most appealing was the credible complexity of John Jordan.
I wish I could say that for all of the other characters, but I can’t. Many of the novel’s suspects are not sufficiently fleshed-out. Some appear in brief scenes but don’t make distinctive impressions, so when they’re referred to later on, you’ll either page back to see exactly who they are, or you’ll shrug and keep reading. The characters who most come alive, apart from first-person narrator John Jordan, are his wife, his in-laws, his best friend Merrill Monroe, and Anna Rodden. In other words, those to whom he is closest.
Lister relies heavily on dialogue which, along with his lucid narrative style, speeds the story along nicely. But he has a habit of interrupting conversations with expository paragraphs, then returning to the conversations. I found myself often having to go back to the dialogue that preceded the exposition to recover the point of that which succeeded it. He also has a fondness for acronyms, but doesn’t always explain what they stand for. I can only guess that FDLE stands for Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Although its impossible-crime aspect isn’t in the league of John Dickson Carr, Paul Halter, Hake Talbot and Clayton Rawson, THE BODY AND THE BLOOD nevertheless merits a Golden Age Mystery-type illustration depicting the layout of G-Dorm and the relative positions of inmates’ cells to where the mass was held at the time Jordan discovered murder had been committed. I found it difficult to envisage from the verbal description given.
Whether the following comment applies to the print edition I can’t say, since I read the e-book—specifically, the Kindle edition—but the latter is in dire need of a good proofreader. It teems with punctuation errors and misspellings, and at least a couple of sentences are missing necessary words.
Despite its locked-room puzzle, THE BODY AND THE BLOOD is not a cozy whodunit/howdunit in the manner of the aforementioned Golden Age authors and others. It is very much a hardboiled detective story involving onstage violence, raw language, and some sexuality. Readers who find these elements repellent are advised to stay away. Those who can deal with them can expect a fast-moving read starring an appealingly human protagonist. My nitpicks notwithstanding, this one is recommended.
© 2012 Barry Ergang