The idea for this series began with a comment my husband made after we spent an evening in the 4-H fair food booth making sausage sandwiches: We are quite the pair, the pastor and the professor. Ruthalice (Ali) Michels, campus minister and Clifford P. Mowry, PhD, malacologist, are drawn from my experience as a campus minister and pastor, my love of mystery-solving female protagonists with a day job, and friends with imaginations as big as mine.

Ali and I have a couple of things in common: we’re both members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), teach the occasional religion course at a small Quaker college, and delight in the care and feeding of a small menagerie of farm critters – horses, beef cattle, the occasional hog, barn cats, a flock of poultry and two dogs – except in the middle of winter when our noses drip, our glasses fog up, and the water trough is frozen!