One was a Soldier by Julia Spencer-Fleming

This is the latest installment in the Rev. Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne series. Clare has just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq as a helicopter pilot. She resumes her pastoral duties and relationship with the Chief of Police. Despite telling everyone that she is “just fine” she’s not fine. She joins a therapy group specializing in war vets and helping them reintegrate back into their regular lives. The therapy group might have been successful if the participants weren’t so invested in making sure everyone knew they were “fine”. Of course all this stuffing of real feelings eventually begins to seep out and they all start to unravel in their own ways.

As is usual in this series there is a good mixture of the sacred and secular. Clare’s faith is a very real one and her failures are very real ones as well. The characters in this series are flawed and in this book the flaws are visible to everyone but the character. The plot centers around a very good mystery but the sub plots are about dealing with transition and loss.

The author uses a strategy that I’m seeing more in more in novels which is to tell the story moving back and forth in time. I find it a bit disconcerting to start with until I’ve figured out the sequence of events. On a Kindle it’s not so easy to flip pages back and forth and I wish I’d remembered that the table of contents was organized by dates; that might have helped me orient myself in the beginning. But after a while the story is good enough to not be distracted by the style.

This is a solid entry in this series and the ending suggests that series will continue which makes me happy.