Fiorella de Maria Father Gabriel Mysteries Gift Set

Gift Set Includes:

1 – The Sleeping Witness

1 – See No Evil

1 – The Vanishing Woman

The Sleeping Witness: In this unusual murder mystery, the tranquility of Saint Mary’s Abbey is shattered by the discovery of a gruesome crime in a cottage on the abbey grounds. A foreign artist and war hero seeking refuge from the world has been murdered. Marie Paige, the frail, sickly wife of the village doctor, lies beside him beaten into a coma.

The police arrest Marie’s husband, convinced that they are looking at a crime of passion. But Dr. Paige finds himself with an unlikely champion: Fr. Gabriel, a blundering but brilliant Benedictine priest who believes in his innocence and feels compelled to search for the truth.

See No Evil: In See No Evil, this third title in the Father Gabriel Mystery series, the detective priest is less than pleased to find himself the reluctant guest at a wealthy local family’s Christmas party. Only the excellent – and probably black market – food softens the horror of meeting the odious Victor Gladstone, veteran reporter, ardent anti-clerical and the only witness to a war- time massacre no one wishes to hear about. When Victor is found dead on the Martin estate the next morning, the apparent victim of an unfortunate accident, Gabriel once again finds himself drawn into the mystery of who among the family’s chattering guests could have wanted the old man dead. What starts as a possible domestic murder at the hands of Victor’s mentally incapacitated daughter, quickly propels Gabriel into a dangerous criminal underworld, where Nazi loot is bought, sold – and perhaps killed for. With help from his old school friend Alan Ellsmore, now an eminent archivist, Gabriel struggles to piece together Victor’s final months, but a return to London means confronting his own troubled past and the memory of the wife he lost many years before. Like any good reporter, Gabriel quickly realizes that Victor Gladstone had a nose for rotten behavior, but as Gabriel’s investigation moves towards its tragic conclusion, he faces the stark possibility: It may not be a question of who is guilty of Victor Gladstone’s murder, but is anyone truly innocent? This mystery focuses on the issue of indirect involvement in immoral behavior, particularly the sale of property stolen from victims of the Nazis and the difficulties faced by witnesses to Nazi crimes in the years following the war.

The Vanishing Woman: In this next book in the mystery series by the popular British author, Fr Gabriel has been sent by his Abbot to assist at a church in a small town where the parish priest, Fr Foley, is recovering from a heart attack.

Enid Jennings is the most hated woman in town, a retired headmistress and embittered war widow, who has a talent for causing conflict and distress wherever she goes. When Enid’s downtrodden daughter, Agnes, sees her mother vanish into thin air virtually in front of her, she is widely assumed to have been mistaken or to have lost her mind – her story is simply too far-fetched to be believed. Enter Fr Gabriel, working on the principle that some stories are too strange to have been made up, who sets out to discover the whereabouts of Enid Jennings, the cause of her seemingly miraculous disappearance and the person or persons responsible.