Murder at Holy Cross by Peter Davidson

In 2001, a startling murder occurred at South Florida's Holy Cross Academy. One of the teachers, a nun named Sister Michelle Lewis, was murdered in the night by an unknown assailant.

But the police who were called to the scene could see the seeds of an awful truth: Michelle Lewis was killed by someone who had access to the keys to her residence, and that meant it was almost certainly someone from Holy Cross itself who had killed her.

And soon they had their suspect, a young man who was training to be a monk under the auspices of the Father Abbot, Gregory Wendt. This young man was Ukranian, and named Mykhaylo Kofel. But why had he murdered Michelle Lewis? He claimed that she had always been nasty to him, and mean. But the Father Abbot was the worst, fondling him through his clothing, and running the lives of the monks with an iron hand.

But the murder investigation opened a number of facts up to public view: that Holy Cross Academy was being run as the personal fiefdom of Father Abbot Gregory Wendt, and that his taking of teenage boys to train for monks was highly unusual in the church. The accusations of molestation by Mykhaylo Kofel were believed to be accurate by everyone who heard him speak. But would the monks be brought to trial for their misdeeds? And what would happen to Mykhayl Kofel?

I found this book rather unshocking, as I've read it after all the accusations of Child Sexual Abuse by priests against young men who worked under them in church, so the accusations of abuse weren't so incredible or shocking to me. What was shocking was how the Father Abbot and his second in command were able to stymie the investigation into the sexual abuse accusations for so long.

In the end, they paid, but not with jail time. Instead, students left the school in droves, and it eventually closed down. But the priests... well, you'll have to read that for yourselves.

After reading two novels with a rather depressing end to them, it was almost nice to read a book where the ending was more or less happy- the murderer caught and confessed, tried and put in jail.But other than that, the story was rather "meh". It was a short, if interesting, read.