The Saint Anthony Variations

A Liturgical Year in Twelve Mysteries

De: Paul Böer

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

In the parish of St. Isidore, things go missing.

An Advent wreath disappears from the sacristy overnight. A nativity king vanishes from the crèche. Candles arrive that nobody ordered. A donation coat holds something a child should not have had to carry. One by one, across the span of a liturgical year, the small mysteries of Galena Falls, Wisconsin land on the desk of Sister Grace Marie Sullivan, OSF — and Sister Grace Marie has a gift that no detective manual has ever thought to codify: she pays attention.

A Franciscan sister who runs the parish's Samaritan House, she does not investigate so much as she listens, watches, and waits for what a community is almost ready to say. Beside her, increasingly, stands Monsignor Timothy Francis McKenna — former Milwaukee homicide detective, late vocation, and a man who builds excellent cases out of the wrong facts. Together they are, most of the time, pointed in the same direction. Eventually.

The Saint Anthony Variations collects twelve stories set across one calendar year in a small Catholic parish on the Wisconsin-Iowa border. No one is murdered. The stakes are quiet and they are real.

For readers of G.K. Chesterton, Alexander McCall Smith, and Richard Russo.