Honeymoon in Savannah: A Detective Santy Mystery

Hi to all of our dear readers.  To those of your who've been kind enough to read our previous Detective Santy mysteries, we are finishing up a new murder/mystery with Clarissa Santy continuing as our protagonist.  She has been a fun character to create.  People ask us who she's based upon, and I'd have to say that she's based on me and my nieces.  In the first two books, "The Tustin Chronicles" and "The Murder at the Abbey", we've left poor Clarissa having a spiritual crisis at the ending of both books.  She deserves better.

So, in our new book, she is married and on her honeymoon.  She and her new husband are big fans of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," so they decide to make a pilgrimage to Savannah to see the sights mentioned in the book.  While they are there, a famous chef is murdered: a chef who happens to be Clarissa's cousin, so it's personal.  She is invited by the local police to help find the killer.

The book is part murder/mystery; part travelogue, and part romance novel; so, we hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we've enjoyed writing it.  We've been lucky enough to visit Savannah about five times, so we've included some of our favorite places and experiences in this book.

It will be coming out in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

Thanks again and happy travels from the husband and wife writing team, Lewis Hathaway.

The Murder at the Abbey

Murder at the Abbey: A Detective Santy Mystery

by Louise Hathaway

It's so strange how life sometimes imitates art.  When we wrote our novel, "The Murder at the Abbey" about a priest in California getting murdered, little did we suppose that unfortunately, three months later, a real priest in California would also be brutally killed at a church.  What would cause a person to want to kill a man of God?  From what I've read about the murdered priest in Eureka, everybody in the community loved him.  It's heartbreaking to read that he was beaten to death with a wooden stake and metal gutter pipe.  Was it the act of a crazy man?  What would drive a person to commit such a horrible crime?  My heart goes out to the family and friends of the priest in Eureka.

In the murder/mystery we wrote, we tried to answer "why?".  I'm a Catholic, so I definitely have a bias when writing about The Church and its scandals.  There is a lot of prejudice against Catholics which, unfortunately, has taken on a life of its own because of priests who've abused boys, and then were moved around to other parishes instead of being punished.  This has rightly fueled a lot of outrage.  But, at what point could prejudice make someone turn to violence?  It is one of the questions we tried to explore when we wrote our book. As fiction writers, we tried to include various factions in Orange County, California who might have members with radical beliefs that didn't jibe with the Abbey's expansion plans.  Is our book's killer part of a group of anti-development radicals?  Or maybe he is someone who's angry that the Catholic Church has just bought the Crystal Cathedral and wants to tear up their "walk of faith stones"?  What about Cook's Corner--the biker bar down the street from the Abbey?  Maybe someone there was sick and tired of having to deal with the priests at the abbey complaining about the loud live music coming from the bar?  Or maybe the murderer in our book was just a nutcase?  You'll have to read our whodunit to find out.  It is available at Amazon.com in paperback and eBook formats.  It's also available at iTunes, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and Smashwords.