New novel deftly joins religion, mystery

STEAL AWAY, by Linda Hall, Multnomah Publishers, Sisters, Ore., 2003, 288 pages, paperback, $11.99.

At last, New Brunswick novelist Linda Hall has found the right loom for successfully weaving mystery and religion into a compelling tapestry. Her latest book, “Steal Away,” returns the Fredericton writer to the detective genre that first earned her a following in the early 1990s with her series that featured Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cpl. Roger Sheppard.

The detective in her new series is Teri Blake-Addison, a private detective with an office in Bangor and a new husband, 10 years her senior, who teaches English at the University of Maine. Hall’s PI spent nine years with the Maine State Police and worked a couple of part-time jobs as a researcher – including a stint at the university where she met her husband – before marketing herself as an expert in finding missing persons.

Hall’s most recent fiction attempted to combine a personal crisis in the lives of her characters with a mystery. She tackled topical subjects such as incest and domestic violence, and while she handled those topics with sensitive depth, the mystery always felt tacked on and not an integral part of the story.

Not so with “Steal Away.” The book opens with a woman digging a secret grave on a hillside overlooking the sea. It is grueling work that takes her three nights to complete before she gently places the blanketed corpse into the grave and meticulously covers the body.

The story of the gravedigger unfolds slowly and parallel to Blake-Addison’s search for the missing wife of a famous television evangelist. The Rev. Dr. Carl Houseman hires the detective to look into her disappearance even though Ellen Houseman has been presumed dead for five years – lost at sea off New Brunswick near Maine in a sailing accident. The bodies of her two companions washed ashore, but the minister’s wife’s never did.

The detective’s journey into another’s woman’s past takes Blake-Addison up and down the Eastern Seaboard from Philadelphia to Belfast to Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy. The story takes place in January and Hall is adept at capturing the area’s bleak coastal beauty and bitter-cold dampness.

Hall’s strength as a writer is her characters and dialogue. Even the people who make minor appearance are fleshed out. The conversations between characters read like intimate chats overheard in kitchens and cafes all over northern New England. Marnie, the curler-clad, fast-talking, Internet-surfing owner of a bed and breakfast inn is delightfully familiar.

The author is classified as a Christian writer. Her detective attends church, read the Bible and prays. But Blake-Addison also drinks wine, tapes episodes of “Law and Order,” makes love with her husband and questions whether she can live up to his dead wife’s perfect image.

Multnomah recently began publishing a series of questions in a Discussion Guide at the end of each novel. The guides are designed to help readers connect the themes in the books to their own lives and to apply Biblical texts about subjects such as forgiveness and adultery to the topics and conflicts in the books.

The guide at the end of “Steal Away” includes similar questions, including one that asks readers to compare the book to the movies “Fatal Attraction” and “Unfaithful.”

Mystery readers who do not consider themselves Christians or religious should not reject Hall’s book out-of-hand. With this new series, Hall has written a compelling story with dynamic characters that is and isn’t the usual who-done-it. “Steal Away” is well worth the stolen time it will take to read it.