Lentorama 2024: Clerical Crime Solvers

Day 22: Bishop Henry Lapp

An elderly Amish bachelor dies in a fire, but it turns out that it wasn't an accident. The fire was intended to kill the man, and it's up to his bishop, Henry Lapp, to find the culprit and make sure that the man who was arrested - who Lapp knows is innocent - goes free. 

Lapp has the usual skills found by the protagonists in these series - keep observational skills, a good memory, and the logical ability to put things together - but he also seems to have an actual religious calling to solve cases, which is a little different from the other series that have come up here. Also different is that at some point Lapp suffered a traumatic brain injury, apparently the cause of at least some of his skills in this area. 

I did not know about the role of the bishop in Amish religious practice, and I thought this page did a good job of explaining what hierarchy there is in Amish congregations. I also didn't know that there was an Amish community in Colorado, but the San Luis Valley does in fact host a number of Amish communities.