Eidson's hard-boiled nun is on it

To the list of clerical detectives in the mystery genre, ranging from Father Brown to the rabbi who slept late on Friday, we must now add the wimpled and robed figure of Sister Ria, the intrepid Benedictine nun who serves as the heroine of "Souls of Angels" by Thomas Eidson. Along with her spiritual discipline and her investigational skills, she is also quite capable of taking down a villain mano a mano if the circumstances require.

Eidson is the author of four previous novels, the most familiar of which is "The Missing," thanks to the 2003 movie version directed by Ron Howard. The author is adept at putting his characters through their paces in rich and colorful historical settings, and this time he has chosen the pueblo of Los Angeles in the late 19th century as the tableau against which the mystery unfolds. The place described in "Souls of Angels" will be only faintly familiar to local readers, and it would take a trip to Olvera Street to lay eyes on anything remotely resembling the scenes that Eidson conjures up.

The story begins with the slaying of a young prostitute named Dorothy Regal, and the evil-doing accumulates page by page as Sister Ria comes to fear that her father is a serial killer responsible for several suspicious deaths -- including the apparent suicide of one of her sisters and the accident that took the life of her one and only suitor -- in addition to the prostitute for whose murder he has been sentenced to die. Given the ever-multiplying number of suspects in Dorothy's death, however, "Souls of Angels" soon resembles a game of Clue.

The Massachusetts-based author takes a certain risk in imagining what Los Angeles must have been like in olden days. He suggests, for example, that it is typical for a rainstorm to reach Los Angeles from the Tehachapi Mountains, "driving the smell of deserts ahead of it." Sister Ria drives herself from her father's hacienda near the La Brea tar pits to a restaurant on Olive Street for a dinner engagement, but even without the gridlock traffic of modern L.A., that's one long carriage ride.

But these are quibbles. The pueblo that serves as a painted backdrop for "Souls of Angels" is a romantic and exotic place, and Eidson uses the history of Los Angeles to make the point that it was a place of cultural change and conflict. "Knowing that the Americans ran the liquor and gambling, the Mexicans the bordellos, and the Orientals the opium," muses the doomed harlot of a dirt road, "she wondered how the place ever came to be called La Calle del Negro."