From the choppy waves of Lake Erie's Middle Bass Island to the too-tranquil farmlands of Holmes County's Amish countryside, mystery and foreboding lurk under layers of tradition and repression before boiling up to the surface with tragic consequences.
For Jon Mills, the journey begins with his decision to retrieve his ten-year-old son from the hands of the Bishop who had ten years earlier cast Mills out of the Order, the same Bishop who is Jon Mills's father.
When Mills turns up dead, dressed in Amish garb, and with the boy missing, Professor Michael Branden plunges headlong into the...

The peaceful town of Millersburg, Ohio, in the heart of Ohio's Amish country, is rocked by the vicious murder of one of its citizens at the hands of an ex-convict. When a local reporter covering the story ends up dead as well, with the convict already behind bars, suspicion falls on David Hawkins, father of the first victim. But Hawkins is nowhere to be found, not even among the protective Amish colony that had taken him in as one of its own regardless of his shadowy past.
Following on the critical and popular success of his first book, mystery writer P. L. Gaus again brings us a moral...

In the wake of a fatal accident involving an Amish horse-and-buggy and an eighteen-wheeler, Professor Michael Branden, working with the Holmes County Sheriff s Department, becomes suspicious about the true nature of the crash. His suspicions grow when the trustee of the dead man s estate disappears a few days later, and Branden knows he has more on his hands than a buggy crash on a sleepy country road.
Faced with Amish teenagers robbing buggies on dusty lanes, land swindles involving out-of-town developers, several people dead, and a bank official missing, Branden struggles to understand...

What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past?
After the first blizzard of an early winter, a Mennonite college girl with a troubled past appears curled up and bloodied outside the offce of her childhood psychiatrist. Mute for many years as a child, Martha Lehman is again not talking.
That same morning, the wealthy mother of Martha's boyfriend is found murdered in her mansion in the country west of Millersburg, Ohio. Professor Michael Branden and Sheriff Bruce Robertson...

Amid a whirlwind of drugs, sex, and other temptations of the English world, a group of Amish teenagers on their Rumschpringe test the limits of their parents religion to the breaking point. The murder of one and the abduction of another challenge Professor Michael Branden as he confronts the communal fear that the young people can never be brought home safely.
Along with Holmes County Sheriff Bruce Robertson and Pastor Cal Troyer, Professor Branden works against the clock to find a murderer and a kidnapper, and to break a drug ring operating in the county, determined, wherever the trail...

As another college year draws to an end, Professor Michael Branden is weary after nearly thirty years of teaching. Sitting in his office on a warm spring day, he receives an unexpected visit from an Amish man who claims his brother, a dwarf like himself, has been murdered. Their discussion of the odd details of the case is interrupted by a commotion on campus, which turns out to be the apparent suicide of a young woman, who, it seems, has leapt to her death from the college bell tower.
The investigations of these two deaths become intertwined as Professor Branden again teams up with his...