“Caught in the Snare of the Hunter” is the most recent mystery novel by David Carlson, in his Christopher Worthy-Father Fortis mystery series.
When you’ve been working with two people for so many years, sometimes you have to put your trust in them.
That’s the challenge that author David Carlson found as he crafted “Caught in the Snare of the Hunter,” the most recent entry in his Christopher Worthy and Father Fortis mystery series. Carlson has been writing novels centered around Worthy and Fortis since 1995, and has learned to follow their lead as he’s writing.
“I just trusted Worthy and Father Nick to take me, as sort of the first reader, along on this journey,” he said.
“Caught in the Snare of the Hunter” is the seventh Worthy-Fortis mystery novel written by Carlson, a professor emeritus of philosophy and religion at Franklin College.
Carlson has been crafting mysteries around Worthy, a highly decorated detective who is tortured by his inability to solve the one mystery that means the most to him, and Fortis, a Greek Orthodox monk, since he wrote their debut in 1995. Though that first book wasn’t published until 2016, Carlson has continued to put the pair at the center of unique and mind-bending mysteries.
“Caught in the Snare of the Hunter” follows Worthy as he accepts an invitation by Fortis to track down a missing priest with a shadowy past. Investigating in the priest’s church in Saginaw, they find a divided community — some are concerned that something horrible happened to their beloved religious leader, while others wonder if he’s a “bent” priest.
“Any time in a mystery where you have one of the main characters disappearing, the issue you present and leave as part of the mystery is — is this person running away from something, or is this person running towards something? In other words, part of the mystery is, why would this person disappear?” Carlson said.
Added to the mix is a woman from the priest’s past who claims her life is in danger, and her criminal ex-husband tracking her every move.
The novel takes the crime-solving group to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then into Canada and a remote lake in Manitoba. They need to face the criminal ex-husband, in addition to differing impressions of the case.
“I’d never had (Worthy and Fortis) have a serious, deep disagreement about what they thought was going on in a mystery,” he said. “That became an interesting thing to me, to have them not only have a different slant on what they thought this priest was about and what happened to them, but then let their difference of opinion even widen as the story went on.”
For Carlson, the challenge was setting up a problem to be solved, and allowing Fortis and Worthy tackle it.
“What I’ve done for the past four novels is, I give my two main characters this problem. And I don’t know how they’re going to resolve it as I’m writing it,” he said. “It sort of unfolds slowly as I trust them as characters.”
Carlson uses the landscapes — from Saginaw, a former industrial city that faces the same issues facing other Rust Belt towns, to the wilds of Manitoba, Canada — as an obstacle that only adds to the suspense.
“It narrows their options. If you’re going to run away to Chicago or New York or L.A., your options expand. If you’re in these desolate places, you’ve narrowed your options,” Carlson said. “To have the mystery end up (in Manitoba), you’re almost imagining the characters going to the edge of the world. You can’t go anywhere from there.”
“Caught in the Snare of the Hunter” is now available, online and at Franklin’s Wild Geese Bookshop. Carlson has planned a book signing event at Wild Geese at 3 p.m. Dec. 4.
