Drugs, murder, and the Catholic Church confound Homer's trip to Florence When the Pope issues a sweeping edict calling for a yearlong war on drugs, no one is more surprised than the Vatican to find the campaign a success. In every Catholic corner of the world, young people throw down their needles to pick up crosses. In Florence, thousands of them converge on the Duomo to thank Christ for their newfound commitment to sobriety. Nearly everyone is relieved...

Murder strikes in the natural history museum of the University of Oxford, famed for its zoological specimens. PI Homer Kelly, a Harvard professor who is in town to give a lecture, will solve it.

A hunt for a missing art lover engages Homer in a perplexing mystery Leonard Sheldrake knows little about Frieda except that he loves her. A Harvard professor and admirer of the bizarre engravings of M. C. Escher, Leonard is visiting a Cambridge exhibition of the artist's work when he meets Frieda and falls instantly in love. As they trade remarks about the artwork, he learns a few brief things about her. Though young, she is a widow, an orphan, and...

In a mystery in which chapters alternate between past and present, the search for a mysterious lost church by Homer Kelly and his wife Mary is juxtaposed against events in 1868 Nashoba as a Civil War veteran struggles to put his life back together.