Showing results by author "Judith Campbell" in All Categories

A walk around the block, a quick drive, before shutting down your PC ? these short story collections are perfect for when you only have a few minutes to listen."

Rev. Olympia Brown has been invited to the island of Martha’s Vineyard to officiate at the wedding of a young woman she christened twenty years earlier. The groom is the eldest son of the sixth generation of the admired and respected island Adams shipbuilding family, and everyone concerned is delighted with the match. As the date approaches, everything is going according to plan...until it doesn’t. In a worst-case scenario, Mother Nature and an alienated and disillusioned childhood friend of the bride coincidentally join forces with near cataclysmic results. ... And the “Best Laid ...

An arsonist is setting fire to local houses of worship. Reverend Olympia Brown can't possibly know that hers is next on the list. What she does know is that this historic community church has more dark secrets than stones on a beach and the sand that is covering them is rapidly washing away. The more she digs into the past, she soon learns that the 'old-guard' members of the congregation will do anything to stop her...until it all goes up in flames. What happens after that is anyone's guess...and there's only one way to find out.

Someone is stealing priceless documents from the Colonial History Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts and substituting forgeries. Sister Benedicta, is a visiting manuscript scholar-nun from the North of England doing researching a subset of religious dissidents in colonial America. To her horror, she discovers several of the supposed original documents in the museum’s collection are forgeries…and all hell breaks loose, and Viridienne Greene, Sister Benedicta, and poet-Detective Fitzpatrick are directly in the line of fire.

An abused widow, a dead doctor and a suspicious stranger. Not exactly the stuff of a merry little Christmas; but a parish minister can't really escape the holidays, or can she? Olympia Brown is the interim minister in the exclusive town of Loring by the Sea where a prominent doctor is about to be murdered. Shortly before Christmas, two very different people come to the church seeking refuge. One is the about-to-be widow and her twin daughters. The other, an undocumented man, living in the shadows of polite society. Both need help and sanctuary. Both will become suspects in the murder. Olympia battles history, tradition and the rule of law as she tries to season justice with mercy, seek truth and convince the church elders open their hearts and their doors as easily as they do their wallets.

On the day after Thanksgiving, the body of a well-known member of Plymouth’s Gay and Lesbian Community was found snagged on the rocks off South Point Bluff. A month later, on Christmas Eve, another man is brutally attacked on historic Burial Hill, but this time the victim managed to get away. Now, a man without a conscience is walking the streets of Plymouth looking for a place to live and a way to finish what he started.

Professor and college chaplain Olympia Brown learns that one of her students is being recruited by a shadowy religious cult. She and colleague Father Jim Sawicki join forces to infiltrate the group and rescue the girl before she becomes another victim of their deadly mission. Assisted by Olympia's resident house-ghost, the spectral Miss Winslow, the two unorthodox clerics encounter a menacing tangle of religious hypocrisy woven against the dark side of human nature as they race against the clock to expose the cult's bloody underbelly.

Plymouth, Massachusetts, America's home town, is shaken to its colonial core when Mayflower descendent and well-heeled member of the community, Thomas Bradford, is found dead in the wrong bed. As in any other town, there are secrets better left buried. But it isn't long until the Rev. Olympia Brown finds herself dead-center in an unholy firestorm, trying to keep her balance on the horns of a curious ethical dilemma.

When Olympia Brown is invited to attend a religious conference in England, she soon discovers there is more than faith on the agenda. Someone on staff has a well-calculated plan to destroy The Moorlands, including the great stone house itself. Olympia discovers embezzlement, tainted food, and a prescient housecat named Thomas, all of which eventually fit into a pattern - but not before she falls victim to a killer's twisted plot.

When a vicious alcoholic dies in a suspicious house fire, Rev. Olympia Brown and Father Jim Sawicki stretch the boundaries of their religious vows to prove his death is accidental and not murder. But evidence to the contrary is mounting and the curious clerical twosome have little time to learn the truth and prevent the daughter that the man abused for years from ending her own life.

Meet Viridienne Greene. A lanky six-foot-tall fiber artist who didn't know she had a nose for solving mysteries until she found herself dead-center in the middle of one. She quickly becomes both the hunter and the hunted when she decides to seek justice, tell the truth, and expose the million-dollar deception that resulted in the murder of her best friend. With little more to her name than a converted summer cottage in need of work, a spider plant, a rescued one-eyed ginger tomcat, and a lot of determination, Viridienne heads into the fray. Outcome...uncertain.

At age fifty, Rev. Dr. Olympia Brown is at a turning point; shall she continue working as a College Professor or leave the Ivory Tower for good and become a Parish Minister. An invitation to serve as Summer Chaplain at a seaside conference center in Maine provides the ideal opportunity to get away and think things through—except it doesn’t. On the day she arrives a distraught (and closeted) crew members tries to hang himself. Despite the tragedy the conference center must open on schedule. Olympia Brown is called to minister to a ravaged community while trying to keep up the appearance ...

An unsettling short story about secrets and people who don't keep them.

The Reverend Olympia Brown is offered free room and board on a small cruise ship in exchange for being a guest lecturer, but the dream-come-true trip turns into a nightmare when she learns an elegant and persuasive male passenger is targeting wealthy, single, gullible ladies for personal and heartbreaking gain. Olympia realizes that despite cruise companies' best efforts, they can't always keep their guests safe and happy because for some of life's miscreants a ship is a self-contained hunting ground where the unsuspecting prey are like fish in a barrel. Luckily for all, Olympia makes it ...

“You Can’t Tell a Book...” You can’t tell a book by its cover, and you can’t tell a woman by her lover, but that doesn’t stop Viridienne and her regulars from going after the truth. A woman who claims to be a research writer has taken a room in Viridienne Greene’s Plymouth B&B, to finish her latest project.. But you can’t always tell a book by its cover, and before long, everyone living in the house, with or without their consent, becomes part of a well-orchestrated plan to catch a notorious felon. As the dragnet closes in, fiber artist, Viridienne Greene, finds herself in ...

No. 7 in the Olympia Brown Mysteries. Olympia accepts a winter contract in a picture-book church on Cape Cod, but someone in that idyllic setting is watching and waiting. When Olympia is trapped inside the old church along with her stalker in a killer New England blizzard, husband Frederick is too far away to help, and the police can't reach her. Olympia becomes both the hunter and the hunted, and only she or the predator will survive the night.

When the son of a single mother in Olympia Brown's congregation learns his father is a Catholic priest, all hell breaks loose. Olympia rallies the usual suspects, but is it enough to keep everything from exploding? The Priest, a good man who never knew he had a son until now, is determined to find a way forward that includes his son. The church hierarchy has other ideas. Now, mother, son and Father Pete find them selves at a turning point in their lives...and Olympia is running out of options. Meanwhile, the music director of the church she is serving, is doing his damndest to get her fired...

Stranger in the Village; a small-town mystery with international connections. Protagonist, Viridienne Greene, is caught in a legal and ethical tug-of war with deadly consequences on both sides. Through no fault of her own, Viridienne is sheltering two undocumented immigrants, the ‘Stranger in the Village,’ in her Plymouth B&B. One is a nun from England and the other was trafficked from Ukraine. One has a blood price on her head and will be killed by her family if she is caught. The other has just given birth to a son she could lose if she is discovered and deported by Immigration and ...

Olympia Brown is serving a dwindling congregation trying to save their historic stone chapel. Located on a prime piece of oceanfront property, the financial consequences and benefits on whether to stay, or pack up and go, are considerable. To add to this, a couple with a dubious backstory ask her to perform a private wedding in that church. After a strange and uncomfortable conversation, she tells the two they need more time to think about this and sends them on their way, setting off a chain of international events that even she could never have imagined.

Rev. Olympia Brown is serving as a chaplain in a Boston hospital when she finds a colleague in a compromising situation involving a patient. Things rapidly move from uncomfortable to unsafe, and Olympia ends up running for her life. Even Father Jim, her partner in sleuthing, and Frederick, Olympia's lovable Englishman, can't protect her from a murderous psychopath with an unholy mission.