Book Reviews: The Alto Wore Tweed and The Baritone Wore Chiffon

The Alto Wore Tweed and The Baritone Wore Chiffon
are two "liturgical mysteries" that offer hilarious sendups of modern church life and the detective story literary genre.

I had just finished The Alto before going to the Synod meeting and took The Baritone with me, finishing it on the plane while it circled for an hour over Houston. Tears of laughter were running down my face as the plane bumped around over a rainstorm. It was just what the doctor ordered to lift my mood!

The protagonist of the series is Hayden Konig, part-time choir director and full time police detective in a small North Carolina mountain town. He calls himself a "liturgical detective." The author has been a church musician himself, and it shows.

Between the two books I've howled in laughter over the satiric depiction of a Re-imagining Conference for Wimmyn Priests; a Clown Eucharist; the Feng Shui Altar Guild; the Edible Last Supper featuring the Mary Magdalene Coffee bar; the Penguin at the Manger and --drumroll please--The Weasel Cantata.

Sample lyrics from The Weasel Cantata (from The Baritone Wore Chiffon):

'The Weasel Cantata, it's not a sonata
You cannot eat weasel, though it may taste fine
Or lizards or vermin, 'cause they commence to squirmin'

Leviticus: eleven, verse twenty nine."

What more can I say? I've ordered the rest of the books in the series and recommend them as just the thing to restore your mental/emotional equilibrium after church meetings of any type.