POSTMARK BERLIN

In 1996, a wayward priest and a determined lawyer work in parallel to explain an apparent suicide in Halifax.

When Father Brennan Burke, rector of Saint Bernadette’s, awakens painfully from partying too heartily, he learns how badly he let down one of his parishioners. He was supposed to have met Meika Keller the night before, but he missed their appointment, and early that morning, her body washed up on the beach at Point Pleasant Park. Meika had no obvious reason to drown herself; she was witty and personable, a respected professor of physics at the university, a tireless patron of the arts whose marriage was apparently happy. She was also a refugee from Leipzig, from which she had escaped 22 years earlier, with tragic consequences. Meika’s widower, Commodore Hubert Rendell, Commander Canadian Fleet, and their two children are devastated by her death. The evidence from the autopsy and a witness implicates Lt. Col. Alban MacNair, who claims to have had a flirtation with Meika and who’s now charged with her murder. It’s not clear whether he wanted more or she did, but she was seen running from his car with him in pursuit, and her blood was on his glove. Attorney Monty Collins, Burke’s estranged friend, undertakes MacNair’s defense. Amid subplots about music, little history lectures, and flashbacks to an earlier installment (Though the Heavens Fall, 2018), Burke tries to figure out why a seemingly innocuous postcard from Berlin with a photo of the old Stasi headquarters sent Meika on a trip to Europe—and not for the reason she gave Rendell. A guilt-wracked Burke, hoping to make amends and trying to clear his own name, travels to Germany to learn more about the Meika he thought he knew. A surprising confession from a Canadian officer who’s been stalking Burke in Germany puts Meika in a new, disturbing, and heart-wrenching light.

Sympathetic characters, a complex plot, and a slew of details of questionable relevance.