Savings and Loam: An Andrew Broom Mystery

The third adventure of Andrew Broom displays the inventiveness and wit that draws fans to McInerny's Father Dowling mysteries and his many other novels. In Broom's rural Indiana town, a stranger known to the reader as Gunther kills the owner of a farm and gets clean away--he thinks. But the crime was witnessed by Leroy White, a middle-aged family dropout wandering with his young lover, Marilys. Leroy's plan to blackmail the killer leads to tragic consequences. Several people die as Gunther pursues his mad goal of possessing the farm, for reasons Broom eventually discovers. The shocks culminate unpredictably in this decidedly different drama in which odd couple Leroy and Marilys are poignant symbols of flower children and their vanished fragile world. (June)