A Whispered Name by William Brodrick

William Brodrick’s monk-detective, Father Anselm, who has previously appeared in The Sixth Lamentation and The Gardens of the Dead and now returns for his third adventure, may reside in a priory but he still has plenty in common with the more traditional detectives of contemporary crime fiction, not least his love of jazz (although this has become such a cliché of the genre that now they are mostly into alt-country and hard rock).

He was once a barrister (a background he shares with his author, who also trained as a Augustinian friar), giving him the investigative skills needed to solve the mystery presented to him by Kate Seymour, who shows up while he’s bee-keeping and tells him she’s looking for Father Herbert Moore, a former First World War officer who sat on a court-martial panel that tried an Irish volunteer, Private Joseph Flanagan.

Review; A Whispered Name by William Brodrick - Telegraph.