A stranger in the kingdom

By: Howard Frank Mosher

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002

This novel of murder and its aftermath in a small Vermont town in the 1950s is "reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird...Absorbing" (New York Times).<br> <br> <br> <br> In Kingdom County, Vermont, the town's new Presbyterian minister is a black man, an unsettling fact for some of the locals. When a French-Canadian woman takes refuge in his parsonage--and is subsequently murdered--suspicion immediately falls on the clergyman. While his thirteen-year-old son struggles in the shadow of the town's accusations, and his older son, a lawyer, fights to defend him, a father finds himself on trial more for who he is than for what he might have done.<br> <br> <br> <br> "Set in northern Vermont in 1952, Mosher's tale of racism and murder is powerful, viscerally affecting and totally contemporary in its exposure of deep-seated prejudice and intolerance... [A] big, old-fashioned novel."--Publishers Weekly<br> <br> <br> <br> "A real mystery in the best and truest sense."--Lee Smith, New York Times Book Review<br> <br> <br> <br> A Winner of the New England Book Award