Here's something truly unique! Do you love mystery, suspense, thrillers, with some romance and a unique, thoughtful detective?

Then John Jordan is for you and you’ll love Michael Lister's "BLOOD" SERIES beginning with POWER IN THE BLOOD.

"Michael Lister may be the author of the most unique series running in mystery fiction. It crackles with tension and authenticity." Michael Connelly

˃˃˃ BLOOD OF THE LAMB John Jordan book 2 from multi-award-winning and bestselling author Michael Lister

The Florida Book Review says that "Vintage Michael Lister is poetic prose, exquisitely set scenes, characters who are damaged and faulty"

Florida prison chaplain John Jordan’s search for the peace that has so long eluded him is interrupted by an unimaginable murder. Attempting to be a good man in a very bad place while also maintaining his shaky sobriety, John investigates the murder of the seven year-old adopted daughter of ex-con turned televangelist, Bobby Earl Caldwell, a murder committed in John’s own locked office when Bobby Earl conducts a service in the Potter Correctional Institution chapel.

This unspeakable act, and the investigation that follows, will force John to confront his own fears and beliefs, causing this man of mercy to thirst for justice. Torn between the seemingly conflicting roles he’s asked to assume—cop and cleric—John must struggle to figure out his identity as well as that of the killer’s, but his past continues to haunt him in the form of troubling thoughts of failure and the resurfacing of his ex-wife, Susan.

Putting aside his distrust of the slick televangelist and his seductive wife, John must ignore intimidation and resist manipulation to find a killer among some very unusual suspects—including two murderers, a child molester, a teacher with something to hide, and Bobby Earl Caldwell himself whose very act of exposing his daughter to such risk causes John to suspect him from the very beginning.

Amid private crises and the torturous experiences of a thoughtful, sensitive man working in such a pitiless place, nothing short of death will end John’s search for the person who killed little Nicole Caldwell. Uncovering the guilt, restoring the balance, John seeks pardon from the self-inflicted life sentence he’s serving and exoneration from the burden of regret he bears.

Michael Koryta says, "If you like crime writing with depth, suspense, and sterling prose, you should be reading Michael Lister."

Q&A with author Michael Lister.

How did chaplaincy work help you write fiction?

John Jordan and the “Blood” series wouldn’t exist had I not been a prison chaplain.

I wanted to write clerical detective mysteries from the moment I first happened upon a 1990 Avenel edition of Father Brown Crime Stories in a dusty old bookstore in Atlanta the year I graduated from seminary school and was ordained.

But as inspiring and influential as I found Father Brown and the ecclesiastical sleuths that followed him, particularly those penned by Andrew Greeley, I was far more influenced by hard-boiled writers like Robert B. Parker, James Lee Burke, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Michael Connelly, Graham Greene, Dennis Lehane, Ernest Hemingway, Walter Mosley, and Cormac McCarthy, and I knew that my clerical detective would be different. I would introduce a strong, tough, troubled clerical detective into the world of the hard-boiled detective novel. And that’s where prison chaplaincy came in. I could think of no better intersection for those two worlds to collide.

So I had already conceived the idea for a prison chaplain clerical detective and had been making notes and sketching out scenes when I was offered a job as a prison chaplain with the Florida Department of Corrections. It was another serendipitous moment in a series of them, and part of the reason I took the job.