Miss Match by Sara Mills

Rating: ****

Publisher: Moody Press

Well done Sara Mills! What a fantastic weekend read! The first Christian noir I have ever read and I hope, if Mills is at the helm, not my last.

I had heard a lot about this series online and was delighted to find that Mills lives in Canada ( huzzah! ) I also read a snippet in Margaret Cannon’s column in the Globe ( note: previously I had never ever read a review of a Christian novel in the Globe and Mail so …kudos, Sara Mills).

I found this on the way up north from the city while stopping in Barrie for a coffee. Barrie has a Christian bookstore called “Treasure House”---which is good in a pinch.

I was surprised to find “Miss Match” on the shelf, thinking I would have to order it online. NOPE!

Allie Fortune is a female PI in grainy post-war New York City . She talks directly at the reader like something out of Chandler . Her office is filled with shadows from eerily drawn blinds; she spends damp nights wracked with insomnia flittering through old case files with a catchy, sardonic eye and she strolls the streets of New York in a perfect, luminous fog.

Basically, she is the coolest, cracker-jack investigator ever in the Christian marketplace.

When Allie’s erstwhile partner and FBI agent, Jack O’Connor, shows her a letter from a former flame trapped behind the Iron Curtain, Allie is more than willing to hop a plane and help her friend uncover a dastardly mystery.

Espionage; Soviet soldiers; post-war angst; and fantastic narration ( not to mention flashbacks to gorgeous Casablanca and Morocco markets ) make this the perfect Christian mystery.

Mills’ Christianity is tasteful and not over-bearing. Testament to this is the fact that The Globe and Mail didn’t mention it once in their review.

Mills is a competent and captivating author who unravels a story so different from anything I have read in the marketplace, I was beaming until the end.

There is true suspense here, saturated in interconnected mystery, heart-in-one’s-throat moments and a whopper surprise at the end.

Allie Fortune: you are one of the cleverest female heroines to hit the Christian marketplace in eons!

Fedoras off to Sara Mills, you were EXACTLY what this mystery lover was looking for.

Off to find a copy of “Miss Fortune”

visit Sara Mills here