Ashes to Ashes

the long version

The Sloan Guarantee Trust is brokering a real estate deal, in which the Catholic Church is selling off a parochial school in Queens to a developer planning to put up a plush residential high-rise. This will be immensely lucrative for the diocese, but local parents are strongly opposed – they went to St Bernadette’s, and they want their children to go there too. The diocese, however, is going through with the deal - the school is not financially viable due to rising costs and falling enrollment. Parents, church, and neighboring residents and businesses can find no compromise -- but does one of the parties involved want to stop the development badly enough to do murder? Another of Emma Lathen’s witty mysteries featuring elegant, urbane John Putnam Thatcher, senior vice president and head of the trust department at Sloan (third largest bank in the world) and a formidable ferreter-out of financial - and other - secrets.