Buy it now on Amazon!
(Kindle format only)
the long-awaited
new Miranda Lamden mystery-thriller
Blood on Holy Ground!
Read the reviews!
“Blood on Holy Ground is an exciting contrast between belief systems, peoples, and forces of both good and evil, making for an engrossing story that’s hard to put down.”
Midwest Book Review, Diane Donovan, Editor and Senior Reviewer
“BLOOD ON HOLY GROUND is a beautifully-written mystery novel that combines a gripping and suspenseful story with thought-provoking and heartfelt spirituality.”
IndieReader: 4 stars
“C.L. Francisco is a modern writer in the tradition of Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis. Her ecumenical view of spiritual experience permeates this magical novel, expressing a love of the natural world and a reverence for religious folklore and fable.”
Self Publishing Review 4 ½ stars
Summary of Blood on Holy Ground
Blood on Holy Ground follows Miranda to the re-purposed convent of Monte di Angeles, where she plans a quiet summer’s research into an old Native American legend. Instead, almost before she can uncrate her cats, the killings begin, and she finds herself caught up in murder, stalked by the killer, and haunted by prescient dreams. Tennessee hills blessed with a deep and almost conscious peace are overwhelmed by one atrocity after another, as the killer strikes at the land as well as the people.
Miranda, a professor of religion at a small Appalachian college, is an expert on paranormal phenomena, and a woman with rare spiritual gifts. Free of classwork for the summer, she abandons her significant other, artist Jack Crispen, and sets out for the convent-turned-retreat-center at the invitation of an old friend, who settles her into a forest hermitage near the tiny Conicoke Indian reservation. Miranda knows that unless she can persuade the Conicoke Grandmothers to trust her enough to share their traditions, her research will founder, and the heart of the legend will never open to her, since her only other sources are a few heavily-edited church accounts.
When Jack arrives for a visit, the two of them stumble onto the first murder victim, and the killer’s bitter monologues join the mystery narrative. As time passes, Miranda and Jack seem doomed to find more and more evidence of the killer’s crimes, goading the murderer into a paranoid conviction that Miranda is out to destroy him. Abandoning his other targets, he stalks her with obsessive fury. When the Conicoke Grandmothers draw Miranda into their circle, hoping that their combined seeing may show them a way to stop the violence, Miranda is immersed in a flood of visions both from spirits of the land and the killer’s victims.
But the murderer finds himself ensnared by his own evil when his assault on Miranda miscarries, leaving him to prowl the forest wounded and delusional, but lethal as a cornered viper. His toxic obsessions create a vortex of rage and evil that nearly destroys them all in its final combustion. Only the Grandmothers can guide Miranda and Jack along pathways that offer any hope of escape from the firestorm the killer unleashes.
