Sacred Lies

A seven-hundred-year-old secret. A collection of letters about to vanish behind locked doors. And two Irish nun sleuths with one night to stop it.

Sister Claire Voss has just delivered the discovery of her lifetime — a medieval mystic's letter that could shake the foundations of the Catholic Church — to the one cardinal brave enough to receive it. She should be flying home to Dublin. Instead, she's sitting in a Roman kitchen at midnight, staring at a catalogue card left by a girl who shouldn't exist, pointing toward an archive in Brescia and a sale closing fast.

Eleven Franciscan letters. Private collection. Sale pending.

If a shadowy faction within the Church acquires that collection before Claire and her aunt, Sister Margaret, can reach it, the letters will disappear into a private holding — legally, quietly, forever. No authentication. No argument. No truth.

By dawn, the Sisters Voss are slipping out through a rear lane in Trastevere, past the men watching the front of the building, and onto a northbound Frecciarossa high-speed train. What begins as a race against the clock becomes something far stranger: a fragment passed across a dining car table by a silent, watchful girl. A medieval historian with a phone number he never called. A train conductor who overheard exactly the right phone call at exactly the right moment. And hidden inside a dead collector's study — three letters far older than anything the catalogue promised, written in a hand that belongs to a tradition the Church has never officially acknowledged. One that didn't begin with the mystic. One that may never have ended.

Sacred Lies is the third book in the Sisters Voss Mysteries — a cozy mystery series set across Rome, the Vatican, and northern Italy, featuring two Irish nun detectives navigating ancient Church conspiracies, seven centuries of buried history, and the question that runs beneath every investigation: what does an institution do when the truth it's built to protect becomes the truth it most fears?