Crown of Thorns is the second in Sigmund Brouwer's Nick Barrett Mystery Series, the first being Out of the Shadows (linked to my review).
Nick Barrett had grown up in Charleston high society as an outsider. His father was from an old, established family, but his mother was a waitress. In the first book, he had come back to Charleston after several years' absence when he received an unsigned note promising information about his mother's disappearance.
At the beginning of this book, Nick is still in Charleston, on a break from his teaching duties in New Mexico, embroiled with his half-brother in a court battle over the family inheritance.
While he waits, he visits frequently with a couple of old friends from his former years in Charleston, elderly twin sisters who own an antique shop. They ask him to help with a dilemma. A young girl from a crime-ridden side of town had come to them trying to sell a four-hundred-year old valuable painting that had been stolen from one of Charleston's elite families fifty years earlier. They wanted to know, among other things, how this girl had come by the painting.
When Nick meets the eleven-year-old girl named Angel, he has no idea what he's about to get into.
The plot weaves threads from a fifty-year-old murder, a young mother trying to escape from an abusive cult run by her father-in-law, and Angel's voodoo-practicing grandmother.
If I had just started with this one and hadn't read the first book or others of Brouwer's, I probably would not have gotten past the prologue with its talk of voodoo spells. I just like to stay as far away as possible from that kind of thing. But I had read enough of the author's work to trust he wouldn't steer me wrong. He's not promoting those practices and doesn't go into gratuitous detail. And, as Nick's journey has been spiritual as well as familial, the author clearly includes the offsetting truth of the gospel.
I look forward to reading the concluding book in the series.
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