Murder in the Third Pew (The Lenora Vale Mysteries)

By Ida Shoulders

At two-fifteen Sunday morning, Lenora Vale finished lying to a room full of strangers.

Then the church secretary was waiting outside her dressing room.

Detroit, 1955. Lenora sings at The Velvet Hour, a supper club in Paradise Valley, and she has not set foot in Mount Mercy Baptist since the Sunday her father's heart stopped in the pulpit. But Celia Ward, who has kept Mount Mercy's minutes and money for longer than some members have known their own names, brings her four lines Lenora wrote as a nine-year-old in the church basement, and asks her to sing them.

Lenora says no. Celia says tomorrow. By one-thirty on Homecoming Sunday, Celia is dead on the choir-room floor beside one white glove.

The church calls it one of her spells. Lenora knows a woman who carried a secret into a nightclub at two in the morning did not die of nerves. With a careful detective who wants exact words, a piano player who has known her eleven years, and a church that would rather pray over a ledger than read it, Lenora follows a dead woman's numbers back to the third pew.

A minister's daughter. A jazz singer. A congregation that remembers everything except what it owes.

The Lenora Vale Mysteries, Book One.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HNHJ8R9Z
• ISBN13: 9798163419760
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 157 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.4" x 5.5"