Francis O'Rourke, noted American author, is more alive dead than he ever was when alive. He was born and grew up in Fox River, a town now seething with big O’Rourkian business. Collectors, scholars, dealers, sentimentalists—the hunt is on for treasure: unpublished manuscripts, unrenewed copyrights, journals, letters, gossip—all grist for exploitation.

Amid the jockeying of rival claimants—a librarian with letters; a bookshop proprietor with a diary; a pair of wishful writers with the true, inside story’s an elusive stranger ready to spy, buy or steal; and the jumping in and out of one another’s beds in the swift completion of their goals—a dead body is found.

How this corpse relates to O’Rourkian huggermuggery and whether or not it spells crime or accident and who hoodwink whom and how it happens that there is another corpse and how further tragedy is averted, this is the story of SECOND VESPERS. once again Father Dowling—with his quiet and curiosity, his sympathy and detachment, his irritability and patience, his kindness and humor—solves these mysteries in another highly entertaining book.