Miracles Take a Little Longer

Before he became an antique book dealer in the country, Matthew Coll worked for a London newspaper. An old friend, a journalist who had recently switched careers to faith healing and evangelism, appears on the bookshop steps, running from the police who suspect him of murdering a young woman he'd reportedly cured of polio. Appearing troubled and tentative, he doesn't know whether he committed the crime. Coll hies off to London where another newspaper cronye tells him the suspect got into faith healing on a bet. Sexual jealousy, LSD, greed and pride figure in the solution to the mystery which Coll unravels in a cool, detached and unconvincing display of detection. This is Lewis's fourth Matthew Coll mystery. (March 4)