The Seventh Night. One revival. Seven nights. One preacher never made it home. When Bethel Life Chapel pitches its tent at a lonely campground in Ghana's Eastern Region, the week promises revival. By the fourth morning, Reverend Jonathan Boateng-the founder's publicly anointed heir, beloved by five thousand people-is dead in his bed with no mark on him, and a grieving ministry has already found its comfort: the Lord has called him home.
Pastor Caleb Owusu cannot make himself believe it. Jonathan was his closest friend, and Jonathan had been troubled that week by something he would not name. Caleb has no training, no authority, and no permission. What he has is grief, a stubborn conscience, and three things nobody else thinks twice about: a donation ledger with one page written on paper that is fractionally too white, a flask of honey-and-ginger tonic that somebody rinsed, and a seventeen-year-old usher who saw a man he sees every night.
Every question he asks, kind people beg him to stop asking-including the gentlest man in the ministry, who comforts him with tears that are entirely real. Because the killer did not hate Jonathan Boateng. The killer loved the church and had come to believe that protecting it was worth one good man's life. A murder mystery about money, mercy and the terrible things sincere people do for institutions they adore - and about what it costs, in a community that has already decided to move on, to keep asking.
The Seventh Night. One revival. Seven nights. One preacher never made it home. When Bethel Life Chapel pitches its tent at a lonely campground in Ghana's Eastern Region, the week promises revival. By the fourth morning, Reverend Jonathan Boateng-the founder's publicly anointed heir, beloved by five thousand people-is dead in his bed with no mark on him, and a grieving ministry has already found its comfort: the Lord has called him home.
Pastor Caleb Owusu cannot make himself believe it. Jonathan was his closest friend, and Jonathan had been troubled that week by something he would not name. Caleb has no training, no authority, and no permission. What he has is grief, a stubborn conscience, and three things nobody else thinks twice about: a donation ledger with one page written on paper that is fractionally too white, a flask of honey-and-ginger tonic that somebody rinsed, and a seventeen-year-old usher who saw a man he sees every night.
Every question he asks, kind people beg him to stop asking-including the gentlest man in the ministry, who comforts him with tears that are entirely real. Because the killer did not hate Jonathan Boateng. The killer loved the church and had come to believe that protecting it was worth one good man's life. A murder mystery about money, mercy and the terrible things sincere people do for institutions they adore - and about what it costs, in a community that has already decided to move on, to keep asking.
