Reverse Vespers at Saint Anselm's
A Time-Slip Mystery

About this book:

At Saint Anselm's Abbey, the year 1954 is unspooling backward—and Brother Peter is the only one who knows how it ends. His diary records deaths before they happen, burials before the ground freezes, and a fractured timeline that drags him from December's final amen toward a January beginning that feels like a lifetime away. With each reverse-chronological entry, the ink thickens: Brother Thomas's heart fails at Nones exactly as written, the Abbot hoards an iron key to a crypt that smells of crushed mint, and the line between prophecy and cause collapses like a held breath.

In the frozen cloisters of Yorkshire, the rules of time have snapped. Peter watches his brothers die on schedule, powerless to warn them—his attempt to save one monk in May only fulfilled the diary's decree. Now the Abbot moves through the monastery like a man reading an invisible script, and the scriptorium's iron gall ink reveals secrets better left buried: a hidden vault, a cipher in the Latin psalter, a fire that hasn't burned yet. The great bell tolls for the dead, but it tolls twice as loud for the living who must walk behind.

*Reverse Vespers at Saint Anselm's* is a time-slip mystery that turns the genre inside out—a monastic thriller where the detective already knows the solution, the victim hasn't died yet, and the truth lies not in what happened, but in what must be written to make it so. Atmospheric, literate, and suffused with the dread of inevitable revelation, this is historical fiction that haunts like a half-remembered prayer.