Thomas Merton, known in religion as Father Louis, was born in France, in his words "under the sign of the waterbearer," in 1915. He studied at Cambridge in England and at Columbia in New York. As a student he lived what his friends have described as a bawdy life but turned from it to become a devout Roman Catholic. As America entered World War II he entered the abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and for 27 years he was a Trappist monk, in the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance. During his early days there he wrote an autobiography which became the third bestselling...

Father Columba rides again This time he is on leave from his abbey in Pennsylvania to do a retreat on the Holy Isle of Iona, just off the west coast of Scotland. It is the tiny dot in the ocean where his namesake, Saint Columba, took refuge and built an abbey over a millennium and a half ago. While there, the new Columba is called upon to solve a murder mystery and unknowingly follows in the footsteps of his predecessor, who had to solve a similar mystery in the distant but not so misty past. At the turn of this millennium, in 2001, author James Baker discovered a journal in the archives of...

Having solved murder mysteries in Mississippi, Korea, Scotland, and Italy, everyone's favorite monastic sleuth, Father Columba, finds himself on vacation in Music City, U.S.A., Nashville Tennessee. There he finds an all too familiar tragedy, one based in love. How he stumbles his way through conflicting clues to solve, the mystery provides his fans with still another highly enjoyable story. In December of 1999, Mother Maria Angela Reynolds of the Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in Nashville Tennessee penned this missive about Father Columba's Nashville adventures: "This brief memoir came into...