Enter by the Narrow Gate: A Christopher Worthy/ Father Fortis Mystery

Carlson (Peace Be with You: Monastic Wisdom for a Terror-Filled World) makes his fiction debut with this middling series launch set mainly at St. Mary of the Snows, a Trappist monastery in New Mexico’s high desert. When Detroit homicide detective Christopher Worthy goes to New Mexico to find missing college student Ellie VanBruskman, Fr. Nicholas Fortis, a Greek Orthodox monk on sabbatical at St. Mary, suggests that his friend Worthy might also be able to help solve the stabbing murder of Sister Anna in the monastery’s remote retreat house. While Fortis considers the possibility that the murderer may be one of the 30-plus monks and novices, Worthy teams with Lt. Sera Lacey of the Santa Fe sheriff’s department to track down Ellie and her friend with whom she fled, Victor Martinez. No surprise, a link turns up between the two cases. Carlson tries to pull too many disparate threads together for one mystery. Agent: Sara Camilli, Sara Camilli Agency. (Nov.)