Barbara Clark

Seems there’s a Black Sheep Knitting Shop just around the corner near the seaside in Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Shop owner Maggie Messina has played the role of amateur sleuth before, a couple of times to be exact, and in author Anne Canadeo’s third knitting conundrum, A Stitch Before Dying, Maggie sets out to lead a knitting class during a “Creative Spirit Weekend” at a pricey New Age spa in Western Massachusetts, where positive thinking and good karma rule the day.

Maggie and the Black Sheep Knitters—her close friends Lucy, Dana, Suzanne, and Phoebe—get to share that weekend at the Crystal Lake Spa, courtesy of Maggie’s friend Nadine, who works there and needs a fill-in teacher. Intrigued by the promised participation of the spa’s new owner, Dr. Max Flemming, whose star has been burnished after an appearance on “Oprah,” the group sets out to experience a weekend of yoga, tai chi and enlightenment in a luxury setting. Instead, they encounter a deadly moonlight meditation, along with some decidedly unholistic activities and assignations.

Also making appearances are spa business manager Anne; her angry son, Brian; Joy, a yoga teacher who has a history with Dr. Max; assorted weekend New Agers, including former model Shannon; Curtis, a writer whose iPhone is busy taking surreptitious photos; and Rita and Walter, an elderly couple with attitude. Some participants seem to be on a possible investors’ list for Dr. Max’s planned spa expansion.

Maggie’s workshop combines “mindful knitting” with yoga, asking that guests “slow down and focus,” while encouraging “relaxation and contemplation” and “a kinder, gentler attitude.” Instead, suspiciously unkind intentions begin to surface, after one of the guests is found dead in a mountain hut. As the weekend wears on, the venal appears to overtake the cosmic, and tensions escalate. The Black Sheepers sometimes resemble eight-year-olds rather than adults, afraid of every twig, tree and unfamiliar corridor, but they share helpful ideas and clues in their close-knit group. A second death casts any remaining serenity to the winds, as guests vie to be the first ones out the door and safely home.

Maggie counts her stitches and casts on all the clues that are accumulating, and it’s not surprising to discover that the final, deciding clue has been hiding in her possession all along. It’s only a matter of time before she unravels the skein of problems and works out a pattern that solves the crime.

When the word “Amish” comes up, it brings a slew of quick impressions: quiet, innocent, simple, non-violent. In Clouds Without Rain, the third in P.L. Gaus’s Amish-Country mystery series (originally published by Ohio State University Press) the author has added a slightly different shading to one particular Amish community, one that is sure to remain in readers’ minds for a long time.

Michael Branden, professor of Civil War history in a local college and newly deputized in the Holmes County, Ohio, sheriff’s office, is clopping about in a borrowed horse and buggy in Amish garb, seeking to apprehend a couple of teenagers in Amish dress who are robbing “the Peaceful Ones” as they travel in their slow-moving vehicles. His part-time undercover work is interrupted by a deadly crash between a semitrailer rig and a horse-drawn vehicle. Branden begins to work with sheriff’s deputies on the incident, one that comes to look more like a homicide than an accident, and his two assignments begin to intersect.

Branden gets better acquainted with a newly appointed Amish bishop, whose intellect and intentions are anything but simple, as well as members of the religious community he leads. Their deep roots in the land are matched against a powerful money-making land scheme certain to test the group’s ethical and religious underpinnings. Branden’s role as an “outsider” gives him a curious advantage, as he goes beneath a placid-seeming exterior of the Amish community to understand the effect that disaffected youth, warring religious factions and the siren call of big money have on the group, increasingly enmeshed in the modern world they try to avoid.

Gaus himself has lived in Ohio and written about Amish Country for more than 30 years. In his own online “Ohio Amish Journal,” the author explains that his aim is “to illuminate Amish culture as much as possible in the context of a mystery story.” His remarkable prose reflects the deceptively simple, sometimes stark lifestyle of these religious folk, with its affecting descriptions of clothes drying on a line, crops wilting in the heat of a flat summer sun, and the beauty of an Amish table, where “the polished lazy Susan held a pitcher of water, two glasses, a bowl of chipped ice, slices of a fruit-nut bread, and apple butter in a canning jar.”

This series is all about surfaces and the deep waters that may lie beneath, in a culture of contrasts where old and new share a sometimes uneasy co-existence.