Lentorama 2024: Clerical Crime Solvers

Day 39: Sister Agatha

Once investigative reporter and professor Mary Naughton, Sister Agatha is now a nun at the Our Lady of Hope monastery in New Mexico. She is an extern nun, meaning that she is able to interact with the outside world on behalf of her cloistered counterparts. This becomes important when one of the monastery's priests is poisoned mid-Mass, putting all of Sister Agatha's secular senses on high alert. She has to solve the murder before any attendant scandal pushes the financially unstable monastery into closing for good.

Sister Agatha goes on to solve other crimes - not always murder, but often - and becomes well-known locally for her skills in this regard. 

Unusually, this series was penned by a pair of authors, Aimee and David Thurlo. He is a New Mexico native, having grown up on a Navajo reservation, while she was born in Cuba but lived in New Mexico for most of her life. They also penned a mystery series where the main character is a former FBI agent turned Navajo police investigator, and another about a New Mexico state police detective who is both Navajo and a vampire.