In which trek reviews Lie Down in Green Pastures

Back in December, I reviewed the first volume of Debbie Viguie's Psalm 23 Mystery series, The Lord Is My Shepherd. I'd gotten my paperbackfor free during a limited-time promotional interval but it is also available in paperback and in Large Print.Since I enjoyed the inaugural installment, I checked out book two, I Shall Not Want, (also available in Kindle format,btw) out of the library and enjoyed it as well. Of course, I immediately scooped up the third volume, Lie Down in Green Pastures, when it was offered for free earlier this month.

Lie Down in Green Pastures is a bit of a double entendre: it is the third line of the twenty-third psalm but it is also the name of the camp where the teens from Cindy's church and Jeremiah's synagogue go on retreat. Perhaps a bit to "pat" and "clever" for some readers, but I always like me a nice, clean double entendre.

In a bit of a departure from tradition, this book opens with Jeremiah discovering the dead body and Cindy coming to his rescue. Jeremiah was rear-ended in front of Cindy's church by a man who had died while driving. Cindy, hearing the collision, ran outside to investigate and immediately called Mark, the detective she met in her homicide case. He and his partner, Paul, are inclined to think that this is a simple case of a guy having a heart attack behind the wheel until another dead body turns up and somebody makes a run at Cindy.

The action in Lie Down in Green Pastures moves quickly. Since I was reading it on my Kindle, I knew that when the murderer was arrested, I was only 70% done. Even allowing for next-book-first-peek chapter that is commonly found at the end, there were too many pages left. The second part of the book was clearly meant to draw the two protagonists closer together. Jeremiah and Cindy have been fighting a growing attraction since the opening of the series. The end of this book explores that attraction and sets the stage for additional developments in the next book. The reader also gets a glimpse of Jeremiah's mysterious past.

From the beginning of book two, Viguie has been dropping little hints and tidbits about Jeremiah's life was before his relocation to southern California. Publicly, he admits to being a native Israeli, but side conversations and peeks into his private thoughts indicate that there is more to his past than simply rabbinic training. Definitely look for more secrets to be revealed in later stories.

The Lord Is My Shepherd was a very well-edited Kindle edition. Lie Down In Green Pastures not so much. There were three typographical errors in the first paragraph of chapter one: "synagogue.His" instead of "synagogue. His" transitioning between two sentences and "offThursdays" and "offMondays" each missing the space between words. Errors of this sort were endemic throughout the text. While not annoying enough to quit reading a good story, but they did occur at least once on every page. The series uses a small graphic between paragraphs to indicate change of perspective or passage of time within a chapter. In the paperback and in the first volume's Kindle edition, this graphic is centered on the line. In this third book, it is left justified. Again, not irritating enough to quit reading but frustrating all the same.

While I would recommend this series and this book, unless you were quick enough to score a free copy on Kindle, I would say buy the paperback. The Kindle edition is $9.68 as of this typing and I feel that that is way too much to spend on a poorly edited ebook.