“The Coven Murders” by Brian O’Hare

A skeleton is found in a shallow grave near an old ruined church. Forensic tests show that it’s a female, had given birth, was likely in her early 20s, and had been buried there some 20 to 30 years. Chief Inspector Jim Sheehan of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and his team investigate but leads are few, and Sheehan’s eyes glaze over when the two coroners explain the science.

One of the coroners is Andrew Jones. He stops for a bite to eat at a Belfast café. It’s crowded but he secures a table. A young woman arrives, also looking for a table, and Andrew offers her a chair at his. They get along, they talk, it gets late, and eventually he offers to drive her to her parents’ home. What they find upon arrival is an open door and the bodies of her parents, killed in what looks like some kind of ritual.

It gets worse. As the police detectives investigate, they find that the leads and suspects begin to die in the same way. These are all well-known, powerful., wealthy, influential people. They don’t know why their phone numbers show up in each other’s phones and directories. But nothing in this case is what appears to be. And then a link is discovered between the skeleton in the grave and the current murders, and the link is the young woman whose parents were murdered, the same young woman Andrew Jones is falling in love with.

The Coven Murders by Brian O’Hare is the third Jim Sheehan police procedural mystery. The novel moves in somewhat a different direction than the previous books in the series. Sheehan and his detectives run up against a force they’ve never previously encountered – Satan worshippers, with overlords and demons wreaking havoc. What’s also clear is that someone is systematically killing the members of the coven.

Brian O'Hare

This is not your traditional police procedural.

O’Hare is a retired assistant director of a large regional college in Northern Ireland. He’s written two previous Jim Sheehan mysteries, The Doom Murders and The 11:05 Murders; three Inspector Sheehan short stories, “Murder at Loftus House,” “Murder at the Roadside Café,” and “Murder at the Care Home;” a work of general fiction entitled Fallen Men; a memoir, A Spiritual Odyssey: A Diary of an Ordinary Catholic; and a non-fiction work, The Miracle Ship: Conversations with John Gillespie.

The Coven Murders is fast-paced, full of surprises, well plotted, and well researched. It’s also advisable not to read it at night.

Related:

My review of The Doom Murders.

My review of The 11:05 Murders

Top photograph by Jonathan Bowers via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"God's Secretaries" by Adam Nicolson

King James I ascended the English throne in 1603, following the death of Elizabeth I. The religious issues that had started with Henry VIII and the English Reformation had never really stopped – a swing to the radical Protestant under Henry’s son, Edward; a swing back to the Catholic under Queen Mary; and swing back toward the center under Elizabeth. But the issues were far from settled.

The background of James himself exemplified these conflicts. He was the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots; he was raised by ardent Presbyterians in Scotland where, for self-protection, he learned to lie and dissemble. And then he becomes king of England (and Scotland) and the head of the Church of England. One of the first things he did as king was to convene a conference at Hampton Court Palace of the various Protestant religious groups and factions, seeking some kind of common ground as long as that common ground accepted him as head of the church.

It was a time of excitement about regime change, expectations of things getting better, and anticipation of the good things the reign of James would bring. It couldn’t last, but of all the things James did, one had by far the greatest and most long-lasting impact – the assembling of six companies of theologians to create a new version of the Bible. It became what we know as the King James Version; it’s impact on religion and the English language can’t be overestimated.

In God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, British writer Adam Nicolson tells the full story of how that version of the Bible came to be. Originally published in in 2003, reissued in 2009, republished yet again in 2011 for the 400^th anniversary of the KJV, and republished in 2016, God’s Secretaries provides the history and context of the times, and how the KJV emerged from it. It was not a sure thing.

Religious conflicts were ongoing. If anything disabused James of his notion of him leading a new era, it was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which a small group of Catholic extremists planned to blow up Parliament, the King and Queen, and government officials.

The conflicts weren’t only between Protestants and the remaining Catholics in England. They could be just as intense between Anglican officials and groups called “Puritans,” people who had a more radical Protestant view. They could be persecuted as much as the Catholics at times; one group, known as the Pilgrims, would eventually leave England for Holland, and a few years later sail in the Mayflower for America. But some of the KJV translators, and particularly the group based in Cambridge University, had definite Puritan sympathies.

Few documents from the translation program actually survive. A few discoveries in the 1950s (by American scholars, no less) of documents mostly in Oxford have shed light on translators themselves and how they went about the process of translation.

The translators had no qualms about borrowing from five previous translations approved for the work. One of those translations was by William Tyndale (1494-1536), and the KJV translators borrowed liberally from it (so did William Shakespeare).

Adam Nicolson

Nicolson is the author of a number of popular history and nature books. His history works include Seamanship: A Voyage Along the Wild Coats of the British Isles (2004);

 Men of Honour: Trafalgar: and The Making of an English Hero (2005); Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson’s Battle of Trafalgar (2006); Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War (2008); Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History (2008); Gentry: Six Hundred Years of a Peculiarly English Class (2011); and The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters (2014), among others. His nature books include accounts of walks in France, Britain, the United States, and Scotland and The Smell of the Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Purch Hill (2011).

“The language of the King James Bible,” Nicolson writes, “is the language …of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good.” He notes that this kind of language has largely died.

God’s Secretaries is a wonderful story of the KJV, one that places the translation in its time and context, and one that judges the main actors in its creation and its translators in their own era and not ours.

Related: “Tyndale” by David Teems.

Top illustration: the title page of the first edition of the King James Bible in 1611.

Take Your Poet to School Week: Eugene Field, the Poet of Childhood

Not long after we moved to St. Louis, we visited the Eugene Field House Museum. I remember an overcast day, a not-well-lit museum, and a focus more on old toys than on Eugene Field, the man once called “the poet laureate of childhood.” And I remember a small story about the museum – it had been saved by schoolchildren.

The museum sits at what was originally known as 634 S. Fifth Street and now known as South Broadway. It is just south of Busch Stadium, on the southern edge of downtown. Built about 1845, the row house was one of 12 known as Walsh’s Row. Attorney Roswell Field, who represented his law firm’s janitor, Dred Scott, in the landmark Supreme Court case, moved his wife and baby son Eugene there in 1851. A second son, Roswell, came shortly after. When Eugene was six, his mother died, and his father sent both boys to live with a cousin in Amherst, Mass.

When Eugene was 18, his father died. He attended three colleges, including the University of Missouri at Columbia, but never graduated. At 21, he received his share of his father’s estate, went to Europe, and spent it. Two years later, he returned, got married, and went to work for a St. Louis newspaper.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Dancing King Stories: Southwark, the Human-Scale Cathedral

When you visit London, especially for the first time or two, two great churches are on the must-see list – St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. And with good reason. Both churches are known for their soaring architecture, structural beauty, and the fact they are filled with English and British history. Right down Victoria Street form Westminster Abbey is another monumental church – the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral. London is a big city with big cathedral churches.

Southwark Cathedral is another church, smaller than its more famous London relatives. But of all the churches and cathedrals I’ve seen in London and England, it may be my favorite. Size has something to do with it – it’s smaller, more human-scale, still impressive, but the human eye can take it in without being completely overwhelmed.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.