Any year when the Fighting Irish don’t go undefeated is a disappointment, but to turn in a losing football season is unheard of. This year the faithful are refusing to admit defeat even as the losses start to pile up. With the students in a funk and the alumni in an uproar, something must be done, or more precisely, somebody has to go. Since they can’t expel the team, they’ll have to settle for firing the multimillion-dollar head coach---but will a new coach satisfy everyone?

There are some---namely faculty members with a distaste for university athletics---who see this as their chance to refocus the school on academics. When the battle between Notre Dame’s academic and athletic traditions turns deadly, however, Roger Knight, professor of Catholic Studies, becomes a marked man.

Accustomed to working together, Roger and his P.I. brother Philip will have to go their separate ways in Ralph McInerny’s delightful The Green Revolution to unravel a campus-wide conspiracy and put the Irish back on top.

Father Dowling has been serving as parish priest and resident sleuth at St. Hilary’s for a while now, but he’s no lifer, and there’s plenty that he doesn’t know about the old guard. So when a stranger comes to Fox River who isn’t a stranger to anyone but him, he has to rely on his prying housekeeper to tell him that the mystery man is actually a well-known murderer. Ten years ago, Nathaniel Green’s wife was dying of cancer, and after a short remission she relapsed into a coma. That small sliver of hope so utterly dashed must have been too much for him because when the nurses came to check on her they found that he had taken her off of her life support. Green’s return divides the community, but the more Father Dowling ponders the moral questions and reinvestigates the case, the more he wonders if Green committed any crime at all.

With parishioners up in arms, Father Dowling has to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a conviction is no proof of guilt in Ash Wednesday, the newest addition to Ralph McInerny’s acclaimed and beloved mystery series.