A Gothic Mystery! "A Darkly Hidden Truth"~ by Donna Fletcher Crow

Book Summary: "Felicity can’t possibly help Father Antony find the valuable missing icon. She’s off to become a nun. Then her impossible mother turns up unexpectedly. And a good friend turns up murdered…   Breathtaking chase scenes, mystical worship services, dashes through remote waterlogged landscapes keep the pages turning. Felicity learns the wisdom of holy women from today and ages past and Antony explores the arcane rites of the Knights Hospitaller. But what good will any of that do them if Felicity can’t save Antony’s life?"    I love a good gothic novel with mystery and paranormal enchantment.  This book has it all!  Don't fail to find it on Amazon...links below.


You must watch this amazing book trailer!

A Bit About Ms Crow:
Donna Fletcher Crow is the author of 38 books, mostly novels dealing with British history. The award-winning Glastonbury, an Arthurian grail search epic covering 15 centuries of English history, is her best-known work. Donna and her husband live in Boise, Idaho. They have 4 adult children and 11 grandchildren. She is an enthusiastic gardener.
Her newest release is A Darkly Hidden Truth, book 2 in her clerical mystery series The Monastery Murders. She also writes the Lord Danvers series of Victorian true-crime novels and the romantic suspense series The Elizabeth & Richard Mysteries. To read more about these books and to see book videos for A Darkly Hidden Truth and for A Very Private Grave, Monastery Murders 1, as well as pictures from Donna’s garden and research trips go to:
http://donnafletchercrow.com

Please find Ms Crows links here:

To purchase her book~

                                                                        Amazon     and  Barnes and Noble

Again, her beautiful website:  http://donnafletchercrow.com will give you such a wonderful tour of her books and very prolific writing life.

An Short Guest Post With Ms Crow Regarding Her Reading Life :   (Taken from her blog...)
People always ask me, "did you always want to write?" No, I always wanted to read, although I did "write" my first novels in the sixth grade: an adventure series starring me, complete with illustrations. I think each book was about five pages long. I also sat in our back garden under a huge cottonwood tree and wrote embarrassingly bad poetry, complete with illustrations. My poetry is still embarrassingly bad, but that doesn't stop me writing it.
I had an ideal childhood for a reader. I was an only child, living on a farm. I would take a book out to the middle of the alfalfa field in front of our house, lay down flat and revel in the fact that God was the only person in the whole universe who knew where I was.
In the tenth grade my Charlie Chaplain look-alike English teacher Mr. Hodgson, of blessed memory, told me the only book report he would accept from me was Wuthering Heights. I still think that's a strange choice for a 15-year-old, and as many times as I have read the novel and seen the movie (and even visited Howarth) I still don't understand it. But it "took". From that moment I was hooked on the English classics and to this day I read very little other than English authors. Jane Austen, of course, is my lifelong literary love.

I naturally majored in English and became a starry-eyed English teacher, aspiring to inspire my students to a love of great literature before I retired to become a full time mother.
My reading life has always gone by passions, finding a writer I loved, reading everything he or she (usually she) wrote, then feeling absolutely bereft when I came to the end. Much the same feeling as having a child leave for college, I later learned. My passions have included Norah Lofts, D. E. Stevenson, Mary Stewart, Rumer Godden, Elizabeth Goudge and Elswyth Thane with whom I carried on a delightful correspondence just before she died and I began writing professionally.
The writer that really catapulted me into writing, however, was Gerogette Heyer. Her Venetia became the springboard for my first novel Brandley's Search, reissued later as Where Love Begins, although my book was set in 1824, so can't be strictly called a Regency. That book grew into the six-book Cambridge Chronicles series.


The Bookish Dame's Review :

I hardly know what to tell you except there's little that brings me back to my young adult years like a gothic mystery.  I love a gothic novel!  Shades of Norah Lofts and Mary Stewart--only more umph and a little better, I have to say!  I could hardly wait to receive a copy of Ms Crows book to review.  I particularly was anxious to read one set in a monastery with a proper, would-be novice nun,  a situation and setting which has always been a curiosity of mine.  That this book had a paranormal twist just made it all the more a draw for me, and once I visited Donna Fletcher Crow's website, I was sunk!  This is a book for a stormy night, everyone!  And, you'll be reading it when you're supposed to be doing lots of other things...I was.

Donna Fletcher Crow is a natural born writer with skills that make reading such a joy.  I identified immediately with her young protagonist Felicity, who is the aspiring nun cum sweetheart of not-sure-he-wants-to-be priest, Antony.  They, as sleuths, are familiar to those who have read Ms Crow's previous book, "A Very Private Grave;" which you don't have to have read, by the way, to enjoy this second book in the Monastery Series.  The couple is irrepressible!  I adore them and their bantering, their bravery and their push-pull of relationship throughout this mystery novel.  I'm dying to read more about them.

In having read the book, I would say that Ms Crow's influences by other authors are apparent, but subtle.  She has a wonderful sense of herself and it comes across brilliantly.  This is a novel in the vein of a Carolyn Hart's Annie Darling series with her husband and mother-in-law, but so much a superior quality.  Any of you who love a mystery with a moral and a twist will love this one, as well.  For me,  historical and art references were a plus.  Particularly those about the Templars.

I'm now going to be reading the 1st book in this series, and I look forward to her new book coming soon featuring the wonderful Felicity and Antony team called "An Unholy Communion."  I truly think I've found my latest favorite author in this gothic, set mystery genre.  Hopefully, you'll try this book, too, and join me as an on-going fan.

Please let Donna and me know if you decide to read...and if you've gone to Amazon or Barnes & Noble to check out her book!

5 stars for my newest find!!!

Deborah/TheBookishDame