After the tumultuous personal upheaval that Halifax lawyer and bluesman Monty Collins underwent in Barrington Street Blues, this fourth volume in Anne Emery’s mystery series gives him welcome respite on the family front. This time, Monty becomes embroiled with Father Brennan Burke, a Catholic priest who runs a choir school for clergy, and with the near-beheading of one of the school’s members, Reinhold Schellenberg, a globally recognized theologian known as much for the religious tenets he rejected as for those he embraced.

Schellenberg’s fellow choristers – including an English monk, a Sicilian priest, and a former East Berlin cop – provide Monty with plenty of leads to follow in his investigation. And what better way to conduct first-hand research than to accompany Burke – who continues to teeter off the wagon at choice moments – to the Vatican?

Emery has increased the complexity of her plot this time out, and Monty, as always, is endearingly flawed, especially when his investigation drops him overseas into the heart of the holy city. The strongest reason to read Cecilian Vespers is for its expansive yet playful nature, be it Father Burke’s frustrations conducting his merry band of suspicious singers or the book’s intriguing depiction of contemporary Catholic thought. Not only does the four-decades-old Second Vatican Council remain controversial enough to be a motive for murder in Emery’s novel, the book also features an appearance by so-called sedevacantists – “those who maintain that the recent popes were not true popes at all” – whose seeming heresy sounds relatively sane to Monty. 

Mystery readers need not cry “Miserere” at Monty and Father Burke’s not-so-sacred adventures; “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” is a far more fitting exclamation, sung with full voice.