Ceremony, Author Note Topic 1: The Chapel

Ceremony (Coming August 17) is the first mystery novel I've written that's not a Fenway Stevenson book. It's the first book in a (hopefully) long series about a brilliant forensic toxicologist with a nose for trouble and the disgraced federal investigator who gets one last chance for redemption. Together, they solve some of the most baffling poisoning murders across the nation.  I had to do a lot of research for Ceremony, and the stuff that made it into the book is about 80% real, honest-to-goodness fact, and about 20% fictionalized versions of events or real places. This is the first blog post in a series of the behind-the-curtain research that went into making Ceremony. 

 Topic 1: The Chapel 

In my novel, the campus of Milwaukee Technical University houses a 15th century chapel that was disassembled in London and rebuilt, stone by stone, in Milwaukee, and, finally, serves as a mysterious and slightly mystical backdrop for the first murder of the series.  According to the fictionalized history in Ceremony, the chapel was originally built in England, the martyr in question was Anne Askew, and the university was the made-up Milwaukee Tech. 

In real life, the chapel was in France, southeast of Lyon—and the martyr was Joan of Arc. In the 1920s, a railroad heiress (and a superfan of Joan of Arc) learned of the chapel, originally called St. Martin de Seysseul. She acquired it, then had it dismantled and shipped across the ocean, and renamed it the St. Joan of Arc Chapel. She owned property in New York where she’d also reassembled a French Renaissance chateau. A few years later, Pope Pius XI gave his permission to hold Mass in the chapel.

In 1962, the heiress sold the property—including the chateau and the chapel—to an American entrepreneur and...Read More