The first in a terrific series by New York Times bestselling author Ellery Adams.

Welcome to Hope Street Church, where friendships are formed, fresh starts are encouraged, and mysteries are solved.

Cooper Lee was at a crossroads. Her boyfriend of five years had just left her for another woman, she was living in an apartment above her parents’ garage, and her job as a copier repairperson was feeling a little, well, repetitious. Hoping for a fresh start and a new outlook on life, she joins the Bible study group at Hope Street Church. The last thing she expects while studying the Bible is a lesson in murder.

When Brooke Hughes, the woman who first invited Cooper to Hope Street, is found murdered in her home, all signs point to her husband as the culprit. But Wesley Hughes was an elder at Hope Street Church, and the members of the Bible study are filled with disbelief that such a kind and loving man could take a life, much less his wife’s. Unwilling to let an innocent man and friend be railroaded into prison, the Bible group decides to investigate on their own.

As Cooper and this humorously diverse group of people—including a blind folk artist, a meteorologist with a taste for younger women, and a soft-spoken web designer who might be out to catch Cooper’s eye—dig deeper into the clues, they’re about to discover that finding the truth sometimes takes a leap of faith.

Includes heavenly recipes from Magnolia Lee’s kitchen!

A Note from the Author:

*Dear Reader,

The Hope Street mysteries were originally published by St. Martin’s Press and written under the name Jennifer Stanley. The titles, in order, were Stirring Up Strife, Path of the Wicked, and* The Way of the Guilty.

I have completely rewritten all three novels and am now publishing them under the name Ellery Adams as The Path of the Crooked, The Way of the Wicked, and The Graves of the Guilty.

*If you’ve read the original books, you will find the basic plot of the above titles unchanged. My intention was to polish the writing in each installment and rerelease the novels as crisper, cleaner, more engaging books. Stay tuned for forthcoming novels in the Hope Street mystery series as well.

Thank you for supporting cozy mysteries.

Your friend,
Ellery Adams*

About the Author:

New York Times Bestselling author Ellery Adams grew up on a beach near the Long Island Sound. Having spent her adult life in a series of landlocked towns, she cherishes her memories of open water, violent storms, and the smell of the sea. Ms. Adams has held many jobs, including that of caterer, retail clerk, car salesperson, teacher, tutor, and tech writer, all the while penning poems, children's books, and novels. She now writes full-time from her home in Virginia.

From Publishers Weekly

The lighthearted first Hope Street Church mystery introduces 32-year-old Cooper Lee as she grapples with the end of a five-year romance. Despite the best efforts of her loving sister and grandmother, the Richmond, Va., office machine technician can't muster the enthusiasm to move on. When a client, Brooke Hughes, invites Cooper to attend a service at her church, Cooper decides it's a good opportunity to mingle with a new crowd. On her first visit to the imposing church, Cooper is welcomed into the Sunday morning Sunrise Bible Study group and learns that Brooke has been murdered and the police are holding her husband as the prime suspect. The Sunrise members believe him innocent and sweep up Cooper in pursuit of the real killer. Stanley's faith-based crime detection has plenty of charming appeal. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“THIS ISN’T YOUR GRANDMA’S SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASS. The members of the Sunrise Bible Study find murderers while they search for friendship, romance, and answers to life's biggest questions. Jennifer Stanley’s engaging new series makes your attendance at Hope Street Church mandatory.” -- Emilie Richards, author of the “Ministry is Murder” mystery series

About the Author

JENNIFER STANLEY has a BA in English from Franklin & Marshall College, an MA in English Literature from West Chester University, and an MLIS from North Carolina Central University. She taught sixth grade language arts in Cary, North Carolina for the majority of her eight-year teaching career. A member of two bible study groups, Jennifer's friends from church inspired her to write her Hope Street Church series. An eBay junkie and food-lover, Jennifer lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband, two young children, and three cats.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.
Psalm 25:16 (NIV)
Cooper Lee was more comfortable with machines than with people. She drove all over the city of Richmond to fix them. By the time she got to these copiers, laminators, or fax machines as they waited in their offices, hospitals, or schools, they were broken. Broken and quiet. Cooper would arrive and meticulously lay out her tools, and as she did so, the machines didn’t raise their brows in surprise or barely concealed amusement that a woman worked as an office- machine repairman. A thirty- two- year- old woman dressed in a man’s uniform shirt didn’t seem odd or funny to them at all.
Most importantly, they never stared at her eyes.
Her left eye wasn’t worth a second look. It was a fl at, almost colorless blue. No one would have dreamed of comparing it to sapphires or deep seas or cloudless sum­mer skies. But the other eye, the eye Cooper had received through ocular transplant surgery after being smashed in the face with a field hockey stick in junior high, was a shimmering green. It was exotic—invoking images of lush jungles flecked with fi refly light or the green shallows of tropical waters, in which sunshine was trapped just below the surface.
That single moment at field hockey practice, when a girl on Cooper’s own team had accidentally swung her stick too high as she prepared to hit the ball with incredible force, made Cooper more self-conscious than other teenag­ers. Still, she wanted what most people want. She longed to have one close friend, to be loved by someone she could grow old with, and for her life to have purpose. Cooper thought she had found all of those in her boyfriend, Drew. Until he dumped her.
Shaking off her gloomy thoughts, Cooper cut a piece of crumb cake for breakfast, wrapped it in a paper towel, filled her twenty-eight-ounce travel cup to the brim with milky, unsweetened coffee, and tossed a banana onto the passenger seat of her truck. She drove east on I-64, the sun blinding her most of the way. According to Bryant Shel­ton’s weather report, there wasn’t going to be a cloud in the sky this April Friday. For once, it appeared as though Bryant might be right, though it didn’t matter much to Cooper. She’d be inside offi ces most of the day, but could enjoy brief moments of sunshine while driving the work van from one destination to another.
At ten minutes to nine, Cooper pulled into the parking lot belonging to one of a dozen corporate buildings re­sembling silvery LEGO blocks. The Make It Work! head­quarters was on the fringe of an area called Innsbrook in which hundreds of different companies, replete with an abundance of office equipment, depended upon Coo­per and her coworkers in order to operate smoothly.
“Mornin’, Coop!” Angela called out a chipper greeting as Cooper approached the reception desk. Angela’s smile, combined with a vase filled with plump, yellow roses, created a warm welcome. Few people visited the offi ce as most of Make It Work!’s transactions were conducted via telephone, but Angela bought a dozen roses every Mon­day, claiming that a good workweek always began with fresh flowers. Angela was in charge of setting up appoint­ments and billing. She was at her desk every morning before anyone else, wearing one of her vintage sweaters, a pencil skirt (both of which were always too tight), and a pair of sexy heels. Angela’s platinum hair, powdered face, and fire-engine-red nails and lipstick were supposed to call to mind an image of Marilyn Monroe, but Angela was older and plumper than the late actress had ever been. Still, Angela was the heart and soul of their small opera­tion. Filled with pluck and boundless optimism, even the frostiest customers thawed once Angela worked her magic on them.
“You’ve got an emergency waitin’ for you, sug.” Angela examined her reflection in a small compact that was never out of reach. “Some poor lady has gotten her weddin’ ring jammed in the insides of a copier.” She held out a pink memo pad and ripped off the top sheet with a fl ourish.
“Capital City, huh?” Cooper said, reading the mes­sage. “I have to go over there anyway. They’ve ordered half a dozen Hewlett-Packard 7410 multifunction printers and I’ve got to bring them to Building F and hook them up.” She grinned at Angela. “A wedding ring, you say? I wonder how she got it stuck inside.”
Angela shrugged. “You know folks like to try to fi x things themselves. You’ve fished stranger things out of those machines. ’Member the bologna sandwich last year?”
“Do I?” Cooper laughed. “That mayo was everywhere. And that obnoxious executive tried to blame it on his ad­ministrative assistant. What a jerk.”
“That’s why I like workin’ for Mr. Farmer. He’s just as kind as he can be.” Angela’s eyes, beneath their curtain of long, fake lashes, twinkled as they always did when she mentioned the boss’s name.
Cooper buttoned up her gun-smoke gray Make It Work! uniform jacket and grabbed the keys to one of the company’s two vans. Ben, the other repairman, was al­ready off on his rounds. He came in an hour earlier than Cooper and was out of the door by 4:00 p.m. He was ob­sessed with developing his naturally thin frame into a walking mass of muscle, so he spent two hours at the gym before heading home to his wife—a woman that no one from Make It Work! had ever laid eyes on. Ben never spoke about her either.
“Can you grab some Mexican from Casa Grande for lunch?” Angela asked as Cooper opened the front door, wiggling the van keys until they sounded like metal cas­tanets.
“Sure. What would you like?”
“Chicken quesadillas for me, something for yourself, and a Pan Filo burrito for Mr. Farmer. He said he needed to be more like Ben and watch his weight but I told him that a little stuffing makes a nicer pillow.” Angela giggled, placed a twenty-dollar bill on the desk, and pushed it to­ward Cooper. “Lord, he turned beet red when I said that!”
Cooper thought about her introverted boss being com­plimented by the effusive Angela. He was a man of few words and usually hid in his offi ce, drooling over the lat­est issues of Technology Review, Pop u lar Mechanics, and PC Magazine. Cooper couldn’t fathom why Angela found their short, balding, hermitlike employer so captivating. It was like having a crush on Danny DeVito.
“See you in a bit, Angela.” Cooper saluted the other woman with her coffee cup and headed out to the van.
A Mrs. Brooke Hughes of Capital City, one of the na­tion’s largest credit card companies, had placed the call regarding the lost wedding ring. Cooper could tell that Mrs. Hughes was either an administrative assistant or an investigative agent in the Fraud Protection Division by the fact that the copier in question was located on the third floor in Building C. The Fraud Protection Division took up most of that floor, with the exception of a large fi ling room Cooper had never had reason to enter.
The second the elevator doors opened on the third floor, Mrs. Hughes leapt forward and latched onto Coo­per’s arm like a barnacle.
“Thank goodness you’re here!” she exclaimed. Then, she looked down and realized she was held clamping onto Cooper’s arm with a viselike grip and that the younger woman was politely struggling to reclaim her limb. “Oh, I’m sorry!” Exhaling loudly, she released Cooper and then displayed her hands, which were coated with black toner. “I’ve really made a mess of things, I’m afraid.”
Cooper could see that the woman had also smeared toner on her ivory blouse and berry-colored skirt. Mrs. Hughes, though agitated, had a friendly face and kind eyes. “Don’t worry, ma’am,” Cooper assured the woman and then introduced herself. “We’ll get your ring back. Which machine is it stuck in?”
“Oh, please call me Brooke. The copier’s right outside my offi ce.”
Although she wore a name tag, Cooper thought it only polite to speak her name aloud since her client had estab­lished a friendly rapport, despite her distress.
It turned out that Brooke Hughes was the head of the entire department. She had her own assistant and a full- sized six-thousand-dollar Sharp grayscale copier at her disposal. The chair at the assistant’s desk was empty and her workstation was covered with mounds of wadded tis­sues and untidy stacks of paper.
“Cindi, my assistant, called out sick today. Again.” Brooke’s eyebrows shot up and down suggestively. “I’ve been trying to wrap up this case I’m working on and I just needed to pull together a few more documents.” She ges­tured at Cindi’s desk. “I was attempting to make sense of that mess when I came across a document that was very, very incriminating . . .” She trailed off, looking abashed. “I’m sorry to go on about all this to you.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “It’s just that it was crucial for me to make multiple copies of this, ah, report so I could quickly store it in more than one location as soon as possible.”
Brooke nervously picked at her cuticles and lowered her voice even further. “I’m concerned that the original document could suddenly disappear.” Her voice returned to normal as she continued. “But then the copier jammed and I was so desperate to make copies that I tried to fi x it. When I reached under that panel”—she pointed inside the machine and Cooper noticed that the woman’s fi nger was trembling—“and tried to rip out the pa...