It’s a Mystery: There is a fine line between a monster and a hero

Credible Threat
By J.A. Jance
Gallery Books, 2020 

The significant position of the clergy in English literature is well documented. The age-old conflict between the church and crime has yielded a wealth of wonderful detective fiction and a plethora of charismatic clerical sleuths. The most comprehensive use of the clerical milieu is made perhaps by Ellis Peters, whose Brother Cadfael series explores life in a monastery in twelfth-century England. Her dazzling depiction of this closed-world setting, which began with A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977), serves as a continuing commentary on contemporary life. 

G.K. Chesterton’s Roman Catholic priest Father Brown is another noteworthy clerical investigator. Although a most compassionate man with an ability to put himself in other men’s shoes with all their frailties, he nevertheless takes a stern theological view of righteousness, as do his fictional peers. This capacity for making sound moral judgements is a vital feature of clerical detectives, however lovable or idiosyncratic. Also fundamental is their innate ability to make the solid, evidence-based decisions essential in the genre. 

Clerical sleuths have advantages over other investigators in that they are usually able to go everywhere, talk to everyone—no one so spans the social spectrum as the clergy—and take as much time as they need. Nor, as a rule, are they answerable to any worldly body for their actions. The key word here is “worldly.”

Nor, of course, can the fairer sex be excluded in this category. Indeed, convents provide unlikely but remarkably effective venues for criminal investigation, such as in Quiet as a Nun (1977) by the very talented Antonia Fraser. Then there are the Sister Fidelma novels of Peter Tremayne—for example, Absolution by Murder (1994)—featuring a seventh-century nun-lawyer of the Celtic church as their distaff gumshoe. In the early eighties came the introduction of ordained women sleuths. Outstanding among them is Isabelle Holland’s Claire Aldington, assistant rector of a posh Park Avenue church. Her best: A Death at St. Anselm’s (1984). 

Which brings me to J.A. Jance’s Credible Threat. As it begins, years after her grown son’s fatal drug overdose, grieving mother Rachel Higgins finds clues that his addiction may have been rooted in damage suffered at the hands of his high school swim coach, Father Needham, at St.  

Francis High in Phoenix. Since Needham died of AIDS in prison after being convicted of multiple counts of pedophilia, Rachel turns her wrath on Needham’s superior, Archbishop Francis Gillespie, for letting it happen. When the archbishop begins receiving “anonymous” death threats which the local police dismiss, he turns to High Noon Enterprises. It’s a cybersecurity firm owned by Ali Reynolds and her husband, B. Simpson. When B. has to go overseas, the case is left to Ali and her team of cyber experts. This includes an artificial-intelligence program identified as a female named Frigg (quite the fascinating character!).

Then the archbishop’s driver is shot point-blank and Gillespie himself lands in the ICU. Ali and the Phoenix PD form an uneasy alliance to stop a killer with no boundaries when it comes to sacrificing lives. In Credible Threat, Jance, with her trademark fast pace, has rendered a masterly study of the effects of grief, rage, and the power of forgiveness. But it is her canny, shrewd, tough but tender lead character, the Archbishop, whose charisma and smarts captures our hearts. As Ali notes: “King Solomon and his idea of threatening to chop that baby in half had nothing on Archbishop Francis Gillespie.” Credible Threat is not to be missed! 

—Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.