skopia
A dumpy Catholic priest with an umbrella solves crimes by imagining himself into the criminal until he could have done it. Chesterton answered Sherlock Holmes with conscience rather than forensics.
At twenty-eight Wedgwood narrated Europe's most ruinous pre-modern war whole, thirty years of armies eating Germany alive, and her verdict of meaningless conflict still has to be argued with.
In 1714 a rope bridge in Peru snaps and five travelers fall to their deaths. A Franciscan who witnessed it spends six years reconstructing their lives to prove God chose them.
Jealousy narrated from the inside by a man who hates the God he does not believe in. A wartime bomb falls on the lovers, and the woman makes a promise she keeps.
Pinkie Brown runs a Brighton razor gang at seventeen, kills without flinching, and believes in hell the way other people believe in weather. Greene makes damnation the engine of a seaside thriller.
Two French priests give their lives to a diocese in territorial New Mexico. Cather dissolves plot into landscape and legend, and their friendship carries decades of desert riding without a raised voice.
Charles Ryder, an officer billeted at a requisitioned country house, remembers the Catholic family who owned it: the ruined son he loved at Oxford, the sister he wanted later, and grace closing in.
On a Georgia back road a grandmother who talked her family into a detour meets an escaped killer. O'Connor's stories stay funny until the violence arrives, which is how grace arrives too.