OUT OF THE DEEP I CRY, by Julia Spencer-Fleming, 2004, Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 308 pages, hardcover, $23.95.

Julia Spencer-Fleming has hit her stride.

The Buxton author’s third novel to feature Episcopal priest Clare Ferguson deftly weaves a 70-year-old mystery with a modern one. It also moves the single minister’s friendship with married police chief Russ Van Alstyne one step closer to outright romance.

“Out of the Deep I Cry” adroitly moves between past and present, with clues surfacing in each time frame. That, along with the author’s extensive knowledge of the liturgy of the Episcopal Church, gives the story a layered depth rare in the genre today.

Spencer-Fleming even seems to change her writing style in the segments set in the past. The details of everyday life and even the words her characters use that now rarely are uttered add heft to the story.

The author sets her latest Millers Kill mystery during Lent. The roof of the historic stone church is leaking badly and threatening one of the stained-glass windows.

When Mrs. Marshall, a wealthy parishioner and town philanthropist, decides to move money used for the free health clinic named for her father to fix the church’s roof, the past rears up and long-drowned secrets surface, along with the passion Clare and Russ share.

Also braided into the plot is an intriguing controversy over diphtheria vaccinations. Fear, ignorance and poverty kept people in New York’s Hudson River Valley from vaccinating their children against the disease during the 1930s. Mrs. Marshall’s four siblings all died during an epidemic.

In the present day, Debba Clow protests outside the clinic over the standard vaccinations routinely administered to infants and toddlers. The single mother believes that a preservative used in some vaccines, including the one that inoculates children against diphtheria, caused her son’s autism.

In addition to all of that, in the midst of Christianity’s most sacred season, a 70-year-old mystery is solved, a respected doctor disappears and the relationship between Clare and Russ teeters toward sin.

“Out of the Deep I Cry” proves that Spencer-Fleming is not just one of the best mystery writers publishing today, but one of the most engaging novelists as well.

Judy Harrison can be reached at 990-8207 and jharrison@bangor

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