Blog Tour: The Earth Weighs Heavy – Alison Joseph

Meet Sister Agnes. She’s not your typical nun. She loves killer shoes, sipping prosecco — and solving baffling mysteries . . .

Now an acclaimed BBC Radio Crime drama, starring Anne-Marie Duff.

Hackney convent — home to Agnes and her sisters — may be a house of God. But what’s buried beneath is anything but saintly.
After days of brutal storms and lashing rains, the convent’s crumbling cellar gives up a terrible secret. The skeleton of a woman.

Her identity is a puzzle the police can’t solve. Not without a helping hand from sleuthing Sister Agnes.
But her search for answers, deep in the convent’s chequered past, only leads to more questions.

Late one night, Agnes is woken by a gunshot — and the fear that history is about to repeat itself.
Someone under this roof knows more than they’re saying. And they’ll stop at nothing to keep their secrets.

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ALISON JOSEPH is a London-based crime writer and radio dramatist. She started her career in local radio, and then in television as a documentary director. Alison has written about twenty works for radio, including THE TRUE STORY and also dramatisations of Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels. She is the author of the series of novels featuring SISTER AGNES, a contemporary detective nun based in South London. She is also the author of
‘Dying to Know’, a crime novel about faith, evidence and particle physics featuring DI
Berenice Killick. Her new series of novellas features Agatha Christie as a detective. Alison was Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association 2012-2014.

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My thoughts: Sister Agnes has returned to the convent in Hackney from helping at the refugee camp in Calais, and is asked to assist in cataloguing the things in the basement.

However, there’s a bit of a problem with the basement – there’s a skeleton in it and the police say it’s not been there long enough to be history  – it’s probably a crime. So Sister Agnes is trying to help identify the person.

The police are also at a house across the road – one of the residents has died from a gunshot. It doesn’t quite look like suicide. So Sister Agnes is also interested in that.

I’ve read several of the books in this series and they’re really interesting, Sister Agnes is an intriguing protagonist, she often seems to find herself in the middle of events, and perhaps because of her slight ambivalence towards her calling always gets involved. She’s good with people and they often open up to her, much as happens here.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.