The Antwerp Alchemist

Liz Maguire is in a quandary. A woman has been found dead outside the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen near the school her two sons attend. Liz has information that might help the police, but has obtained this information confidentially and releasing it would put at risk five other women barely out of the schoolroom.

The women have been caught up in an international prostitution scheme as clever as it is vicious. The scheme is broad based and includes trafficking children as well as adults. As the wife of a Colombian diplomat experienced in fighting international drug cartels, Liz believes in trusting the police, but recent experiences have taught her that trust can sometimes be misplaced.

Liz also has reason to suspect that officials in the Roman Catholic Church in Antwerp and in Baltimore have been involved. As a lifelong Catholic and former Jesuit Volunteer, Liz is proud of her church's many programs that help refugees, and hates even thinking that unscrupulous members of the clergy may be subverting these programs for their own benefit. She is particularly concerned about an irascible ninety-two year old nun, Sister Patricia Marie, a long-time family friend who seems to be caught up in the scandal - perhaps innocently.

How Liz protects these young girls, helps to solve the murder and disband the prostitution network while remaining true to her professional responsibilities as a social worker at the Bethsaida Medical Center and her personal responsibilities as mother, wife and daughter form the basis of this novel, the second in the Liz Maguire series.

Mary Leach PhD is an octogenarian who has spent more than forty years in higher education, including the last twenty as a senior academic administrator at the medical campus of the University of Maryland in Baltimore. This is her first novel.