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Sinner’s Prayer by Dwain Lee

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Sinner’s Prayer

The remains of a highly regarded church member who disappeared without a trace almost forty years earlier are found buried in the basement of Parkvale Presbyterian Church in Louisville. Almost immediately after the discovery, another much-beloved former member dies by suicide at a lonely scenic roadside overlook. Are the two deaths related?

Presbyterian minister Dan Randolph is pondering his legacy as retirement nears. Now, he’s got to deal with the murder, too, which hasn’t just dug up bones, but also long-held secrets of misconduct, sexual abuse, and scandal-along with angry demands for his own ouster, with some claiming he’s mishandled the situation.

SINNER’S PRAYER is the second in a series of mysteries featuring Dan Randolph and his violin-making husband Greg Zhu. As the mystery unfolds, readers get an engaging, humorous, sometimes frustrating, and often touching look into their very different personalities and their unique relationship. At the same time, the book examines serious issues of not only the underlying murder, but suicide, sexual abuse within the church, homophobia, and the changing social realities of living as one’s authentic self, told through a series of flashbacks from present time to 1985. Follow Dan and Greg as the mystery makes its way through southwestern Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston as well as their hometown of Louisville.

Who killed the man in the basement-and why?

Sinner’s Prayer (A Dan Randolph/Greg Zhu Mystery)
LGBTQ+ Traditional Mystery
2nd in Series following Plausible Deception
Settings – Primarily Louisville, Kentucky, along with southwestern Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Maison Laide Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 25, 2026
Print length ‏ : ‎ 328 pages
Paperback
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8218702953
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GT28D7W6
Digital
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8218704353
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GTC9G4C6

To purchase your copy of Sinner’s Prayer, click any of the following links: Author’s Online Store, Amazon & B&N

Character Guest Post For Sinner’s Prayer

Hi, my name is Chuck Eberly. If you read Sinner’s Prayer, you’ll learn about Dan Randolph, the current pastor of Parkvale Presbyterian Church. You’ll learn a lot about me, too. You see, I was the pastor at Parkvale too, almost 40 years before Dan arrived there.

Back in the 1980s, Parkvale loved me (at least most of the people did—but let’s not get ahead of things). I was young, good-looking, energetic, well-spoken, not long out of seminary, and from a respectable upper middle-class family. I had a beautiful wife and young, adorable kids. In short, I was the kind of person that almost every pastoral search committee dreamt of finding. I had a long tenure at Parkvale. Some older parishioners still speak fondly of me and my time at the church, and even now, I know that Dan has to deal with an occasional “Well Chuck Eberly would have done it differently” comment. I’m sure it drives him crazy at times, as those kinds of comparisons annoy all pastors.

My pastoral trajectory looked very bright and moving ever-upward. Something happened during my time at Parkvale, though, that changed my career trajectory. I pastored a couple of other congregations afterward, but my heart didn’t seem to be in it. My supposedly picture-perfect marriage failed, and I worked in more administrative positions for a while before I eventually retired. As this story unfolds, you’ll learn that things at Parkvale weren’t always what they seemed—not with the congregation, and not with their pastor, either.

These days, I spend my retirement quietly, puttering in my backyard, doing a little bit of travel, and largely minding my own business. I live in a tidy little brick Cape Cod house in Louisville, in a little neighborhood just across the street from Louisville’s historic Bowman Field, the oldest continuously operating commercial airport in the country. Its other claim to fame is that it was the airport featured in the classic James Bond movie Goldfinger. I enjoy sitting in the shade of my backyard and trying to identify the types of planes that occasionally fly overhead as they’re arriving or departing. Bowman Field is also extremely busy during the Kentucky Derby, and during that time every year, I’ll look up at all the private jets coming and going and wonder what celebrities are flying overtop of my house. I suppose that might sound boring, but after a long career of being involved in everything, “boring” is perfect. Now, I don’t bother anyone else, and they don’t bother me, and that’s just the way I like it.

When I saw news reports that a body had been found buried in the basement of Parkvale’s basement, my head overflowed with all sorts of thoughts and memories. I knew that the police wouldn’t take long to stop by to interview me, since I was the pastor when they determined the murder took place. I wasn’t totally surprised that I also got a visit from Dan to discuss the situation also, since it had such an impact on the church. It might seem odd that although I still live in Louisville, that I’d never met him before this time, but as I told Dan when he visited, once I retired I almost completely walked away from the church. I’d had enough of… well, again, I don’t want to get ahead of things. Suffice it to say that my meeting with Dan Randolph didn’t end well—we didn’t part ways on good terms, to put it mildly. It was clear to me that he came into our conversation about the church back in the day with some preconceived ideas, and without getting into details, I’ll just say that he didn’t know all that he thought he knew.

If you read the book, I think you’ll see that one undercurrent throughout several of the characters—including myself—is the concept of redemption. I don’t mean that in a particularly religious sense, and I don’t think that some of the characters would even speak in those terms, but the concept still remains. As a person who has pondered questions of redemption, both professionally and personally, for decades, I can say that this mystery, without making a huge point of it, asks important questions about redemption: How exactly would a person define it? Who may be in need of it, and who may be deserving of it? And whether they deserve it or not, is it even possible? These are all questions that, frankly, I’ve asked myself for decades, and with good reason. As you’ll learn, I’ve been carrying a lot of secrets, about a lot of things, and for a long, long time.

As I’ve said, after my first meeting with Dan Randolph, I didn’t like him. As things turned out, despite some people using me as a standard to measure his abilities, I actually came to envy him for something very important. And even though it came with great emotional cost to me, I also owe him a debt of gratitude for ultimately helping lift an important burden from my shoulders.

Thanks for allowing me a chance to tell you a little about myself. I hope that you check out Sinner’s Prayer and that you enjoy it. If you do, you’ll learn more things about me, including some unsettling things that I haven’t shared here. When that happens, all I ask is that you give me a fair assessment, recognizing that I am a person of my own particular time and place, with my own shortcomings, fears, and failures, and that all human beings are complex and sometimes even contradictory creatures.

Sinner’s Prayer Author Dwain Lee

DWAIN LEE is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). He is a graduate of Penn State University and Trinity Lutheran Seminary.

Before entering the ministry, he was an architect in private practice for many years, mostly in Columbus, Ohio. He and his husband currently live in Louisville, Kentucky, where he works, writes, supports the arts, and is active in various forms of social justice advocacy. He has two daughters he is immensely proud of, enjoys travel, gardening, home repair, camping, and yoga, and is a member of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels.

To learn more about Dwain, click any of the following links: Website, Facebook, and Instagram.

Visit all the Stops on the Tour!

May 13 – Books1987 – SPOTLIGHT

May 14 – Deal Sharing Aunt – AUTHOR INTERVIEW

May 15 – Books, Ramblings, and Tea – SPOTLIGHT  

May 16 – The Mystery of Writing – CHARACTER GUEST POST

May 17 – FUONLYKNEW – SPOTLIGHT

May 18 – Sarcastically Yours, Jen – SPOTLIGHT

May 19 – Guatemala Paula Loves to Read– SPOTLIGHT

May 20 – Boys’ Mom Reads! – REVIEW

May 21 – Sarandipity’s – CHARACTER INTERVIEW

May 22 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT

May 23 – Socrates Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT

May 24 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – SPOTLIGHT

May 25 – Carla Loves To Read – CHARACTER GUEST POST*

May 26 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – REVIEW

Elena Hartwell/Elena Taylor