Rivers to Blood (John Jordan Mysteries Book 5)

An escaped inmate. A shocking lynching.A harrowing river rescue. A thrilling mystery featuring a detective like no other! John Jordan is smart, thoughtful, compassionate, and utterly unique! You’ll love Michael Lister's "BLOOD" SERIES beginning with POWER IN THE BLOOD.

Witness the 6th entry in what Florida Weekly called "a treasure of contemporary literature--suspenseful, provocative, and unsettling," and bestselling author Julia Spencer-Fleming says is "one of the most ambitious and unusual crime fiction series going. Read this and see what crime fiction is capable of."

˃˃˃ Rivers to Blood John Jordan book 6 from multi-award-winning and bestselling author Michael Lister

"Lister deftly juggles multiple plot lines in his Sixth John Jordan novel. The Florida-based prison chaplain sees a prisoner transport van swerve off the road. When Jordan investigates, an escaped inmate knocks him unconscious. A sexual predator serving time in the prison is forcing inmates to sodomize each other. Finally, there's a lynching. To add to his woes, the chaplain is in a long dark night of the soul that appears to have no end. With all those balls in the air, it's impressive that Lister doesn't drop any, and that the pieces come together plausibly." Publisher's Weekly

Following the Florida Book Award-winning previous novel, Blood Sacrifice, John Jordan returns in Rivers to Blood to search for an escaped prisoner, a shocking murderer, and a sadist forcing his victims violate themselves--all while trying to take care of his family, friends, and the members of his very errant flock.

"Former cop and current prison chaplain John Jordan has his hands full. Lister's sixth John Jordan novel (following Blood Sacrifice, 2012) offers the soulful chaplain and intuitive sleuth a barrage of crimes and scary ne'er-do-wells to deal with, but readers can be sure that John will abide. Lister's impoverished, rural setting is deeply evocative of a Florida disappearing under the barrage of development. Rivers to Blood is worth a visit." Booklist

Bestselling author Lisa Unger says, "John Jordan manages to be deeply flawed yet utterly appealing" while PJ Parrish adds, "Chaplain John Jordan is one of crime fiction's most original heroes."

Rivers to Blood marks the return of one of the most popular, unique, and beloved detectives of our time. Q&A with author Michael Lister. How did chaplaincy work help you write fiction?

John Jordan and the “Blood” series wouldn’t exist had I not been a prison chaplain.

I wanted to write clerical detective mysteries from the moment I first happened upon a 1990 Avenel edition of Father Brown Crime Stories in a dusty old bookstore in Atlanta the year I graduated from seminary school and was ordained.

But as inspiring and influential as I found Father Brown and the ecclesiastical sleuths that followed him, particularly those penned by Andrew Greeley, I was far more influenced by hard-boiled writers like Robert B. Parker, James Lee Burke, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Michael Connelly, Graham Greene, Dennis Lehane, Ernest Hemingway, Walter Mosley, and Cormac McCarthy, and I knew that my clerical detective would be different. I would introduce a strong, tough, troubled clerical detective into the world of the hard-boiled detective novel. And that’s where prison chaplaincy came in. I could think of no better intersection for those two worlds to collide.

So I had already conceived the idea for a prison chaplain clerical detective and had been making notes and sketching out scenes when I was offered a job as a prison chaplain with the Florida Department of Corrections. It was another serendipitous moment in a series of them, and part of the reason I took the job was to fully immerse myself in an environment and culture I really didn’t want to enter any other way.

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