As you can see in the image below, that’s the title of a novel by Julia Spencer-Fleming. If you like having the context that you can get by reading previous books in a series, you may want to go back and read two earlier ones that I have reviewed: To Darkness and to Death and Hid from our Eyes.

At Midnight Comes the Cry is definitely not a whodunit, but I’d say it’s a thriller of sorts. As you know if you’ve read the author’s previous books (or my reviews of two of them — see the links above), the protagonist is a female Episcopal priest, which is always relevant to the books even though Spencer-Fleming fortunately never hits the reader over the head with it. In this case the novel takes place during Advent: consequently there is too much Anglo-Catholic stuff in the story — OK, really not too much of it, I suppose, but still….

Considering what the political climate has been like in the last ten years, it comes as no surprise that there are more overt political clashes in this novel than in the prior ones. For the most part “we” have stopped talking to “them” in real life — but my favorite lines in the book are these:

“If people like us don’t talk to people like them, how are they ever going to change?”

and

“In some people’s eyes, I will never not be an immigrant.”

There is also an interesting pair of so-called free-range parents, interesting because they are clearly but unexpectedly right-wing. Go read the book to find out how that makes sense, because it does.

Categories: Books