** spoiler alert ** I decided to take a break from tried-and-true mystery series and instead look up a new author, who had the good fortune to be sitting on top of a stack of books at Smith Family. This book promised a mystery that had won six first-time mystery writer awards -- and it also promised a crime story starring a female Episcopal priest who used to be an Army Ranger. Yeah.

So: I read it. It starts with a baby being placed on the church steps, and a note instructing the new priest to give it to a specific couple to raise. The Reverend Clare Fergusson teams up with small-town Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne to try and figure out where this little guy came from (and to try and make his path to a deserving, happy home the shortest possible).

Shortly thereafter, the biological mother is found dead, so instantly, the couple is suspect. Then the bio mom's family comes under suspicion. So Russ and Clare go on some predictable adventures into side-story territory; along the way they half fall in love with each other, swapping stories about their military service and the difficulty of their lives of service now, and on and on and on.

I wasn't exactly disappointed in the book so much as I was underwhelmed, or perhaps just whelmed. The book was constructed precisely as every other mystery of the straight-to-paperback genre is constructed: crime; doubling-down on crime; red herring; action scene in which our hero faces danger; resolution. It seemed like the kind of book one would write if one was working out of a How To Write a Competent Mystery! book -- particularly if Step One is "Include Some Quirky Characters!"

Spencer-Fleming had her scenery down. I have little doubt that she lives in or near a small northeastern U.S. town that has tons of snow and probably heaps of uppity Episcopalians. Everything here was done just fine -- but that's it. The action scene was competent, which is to say boring, because any reader who's paying the least bit of attention knows the hero will survive, the mystery will be solved, and everyone will get what they deserve.