The Tree Terror (The Mercy and Justice Mysteries)

Enjoy this Contemporary Small Town Sleuthing Couple Holiday Mystery

Mayor Shelby almost falls out of the Fire Department's bucket truck during the annual Myerton Holiday Tree Lighting celebration. What first looks like an accident takes a sinister turn when it becomes clear that someone sabotaged the latch. While Mayor Shelby is convinced someone is trying to kill her, Helen is not as sure. It could be one of her officers, or even one of the town's fire fighters. But when Mayor Shelby is attacked by Santa's reindeer at the Myerton Holiday Parade, Helen, Dan, and the other officers of Myerton's police force race to find her potential assassin before it's too late.

Meanwhile, Father Tom tries to help a still-suffering Miriam Conway come back to the world. But will she ever be able to overcome what happened to her?

The Tree Terror is the nineteenth novel in The Mercy and Justice Mysteries, a contemporary small town mystery series. The series is a sequel to The Father Tom Mysteries that began with The Penitent Priest and includes the same cast of characters. It features Father Tom Greer, a Catholic Priest who is also an amateur sleuth in the tradition of Father Brown, and his wife Helen Greer, female Chief of Police and detective in the tradition of Kinsey Millhone.

Susan Mathis was born in and grew up in an extremely small town in Alachua County, Florida where her family has lived for more than 100 years. When Susan was still very young, James (J.R) Mathis was born in a somewhat bigger small town about 100 miles south of where she lived. Within a decade, James' small town would become part of Orlando, the biggest tourist destination in the United States. He was not amused. That is how, while Susan was running barefoot, swimming in lakes full of alligators and feeding chickens, James was sitting in his bedroom reading books faster than his father could bring them home from the library.

Were James and Susan to write their love story, it would definitely be an enemies-to-lovers trope. They met in the library where he was working. He found her demands for books that he had to pull and bring to her so unreasonable that he actually turned her into the head librarian. She in turn was so anxious to drive him away that when some friends secretly set them up she laid out an entire speech about how miserable her life was (she is typically very upbeat). Little did she suspect that he had a passionate attraction to misery and they were married just over a year later.

Fast forward 26 years, three children, four grandchildren and 20 years of James working for the Federal government. He was diagnosed with a highly treatable but still very scary form of cancer. As so often happens, this brush with mortality inspired him to do something he'd always wanted to do, write a novel. After the publication of the second Father Tom Mystery, Susan joined him as coauthor. As far as the Mathises are concerned, writing together is the most fun a couple can have sitting at a computer.