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Blood Of The Prodigal
P. L. Gaus
From the tranquil farmlands of Holmes County?s Amish countryside to the choppy waters off Lake Erie?s Middle Bass Island, mystery and foreboding lurk under layers of tradition and repression before boiling to the surface with tragic consequences.
Ohio-Country Mystery #1
Plume
October 2010
On Sale: September 28, 2010
Featuring: Bishop Eli Miller; Pastor Caleb Troyer; Michael Brandon
256 pages ISBN: 0452296463 EAN: 9780452296466 Paperback (reprint)
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Mystery Amateur Sleuth | Inspirational Amish
Set authentically among the Old Order Amish of Holmes
County, Ohio – home to the largest Amish and Mennonite
settlements in the world – Blood of the Prodigal offers
readers a growing understanding of Amish ways. For Jonah Miller, shunned by his Old Order sect and cast
into the wider world, the summer begins with his decision to
kidnap his ten-year-old son from the home of the bishop who
had exiled Miller a decade earlier. In his desperation to
retrieve the boy, the bishop appeals for help to the only
"English" men the sect would ever approve. Professor Michael Branden and Pastor Caleb Troyer had been
looking forward to the kind of sleepy rural summer they had
enjoyed as boyhood friends growing up in the small college
town of Millersburg. Instead, they plunge into the normally
closed Amish culture to find the boy. When the kidnapping
leads to murder, they can no longer keep the case from the
law. Working sometimes at cross purposes with his friend
Sheriff Bruce Robertson, Professor Branden digs through the
past to uncover truths that many would prefer to leave
undisturbed. Little does he suspect that even the anguished
bishop, torn by an insoluble moral dilemma, tragically does
not tell everything he knows about the case. Suddenly the
vast tangle of Amish and Mennonite settlements that sprawl
among several thousand small farms and homesteads seems less
bucolic than unknowable and impenetrable. As they inquire delicately among the peaceful ones, Branden
and Troyer learn that the troubles of Jonah Miller began far
earlier than the kidnapping, with his Rumschpringe – the
customary wild year before taking Amish vows. But his grand
Rumschpringe had exploded into a decade of drugs, whiskey,
and women, in the company of people no Amish person should meet. In the tradition of Tony Hillerman, P. L. Gaus depicts a
culture that successfully stands outside the mainstream yet
interacts with it in complex and fascinating ways, a culture
that is every bit as susceptible to the undertow of the
human spirit as any we might know.
Amish-Country Mysteries
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