FIRST, MOVE THE BONES: A NOVEL

Accounts vary, but most likely in either late 1917 or early to mid-1918, the unofficial and institutionally suppressed discovery of a woman's skeletal remains-the victim of a crime-rocked the Catholic community of Holy Rosary in the small settlement of Isadore-sometimes known as the Four Corners in Leelanau County in northern Michigan. The death was newsworthy on its own merits. But the fact that the remains found were those of a Catholic nun who had gone missing from the community a decade earlier made the story even more intriguing. That her bones were found buried in a shallow grave in the basement of the same church where she had regularly attended Mass, and adjacent to the parish's school where she had served as a teacher, added multiple layers of sensationalism.

After all this time, and all the above, the story deserves a fresh review.