Review - The Lord Is My Shepherd: The Psalm 23 Mysteries

Let me start off with the fact that I did enjoy this book. Most of this review is going to sound very negative, but I liked the book. I would give it a 3 out of 5 stars if I was giving stars. It was not great, but it wasn’t a waste of my time either. It just had some problems. Small ones, mostly, but quite a few of them.

First, I thought that a book called “The Lord Is My Shepherd” by Debbie Viguie from a series called “The Psalm 23 mysteries” would be a cozy mystery. To me, it seemed a given. Inevitable. I was wrong. This book qualifies as a cozy in it’s use of an unconventional amateur sleuth (actually two amateur sleuths, but one of them is primary), as well as in it’s lack of sexual content. The small community setting is in effect here, and does a nice job of melding two small communities (and some of their biases) into one community.

This book doesn’t qualify as a cozy, in my opinion, because of the level of violence. The book deals with a serial killer (many cozies do), and this serial killer’s crimes are described in fairly explicit detail. While it’s not extremely gory, it is a little gory for the cozy category.


I’m not saying that a mystery has to be a cozy to be a good book. I love all mysteries. There are bunches of non-cozies in my mental list of loves. I just think that the title may mislead the reader into thinking that it will be free of all graphic gore, and this is not the case. I also do not feel that the author is being intentionally misleading. I just feel that the reader may mislead themselves.


That being said, the crimes were not too graphic for me. That was OK. I actually found the killer’s modus operandi intriguing. I was even more intrigued that the crimes had occurred in other cities as well, but that no one had recognized the pattern. It was a really nice book concept.


Where the book lost me was in the motive of the crimes. I can’t go into too much detail here, as I don’t believe in spoilers. The fact of the matter is that there are several elements in the killers motive. Each of these motives would be plenty of motive for any author. They run along the lines of personal jealousy, professional jealousy, betrayal, revenge, moral outrage, and a few others that I hesitate to mention as they start to head into the range of spoiler.


The problem with this book is that it uses all of these motives. The story behind the motive starts to read like a long running soap opera. You know the ones that I mean. It’s not just that Sadie is pregnant. It’s that she’s pregnant by her sister’s husband. Who also happens to be her father’s brother. And her husband’s arch rival. Because they had a fight in grade school. The grade school fight caused one of them to be a pillar of society. The other chose to live his life on the wrong side of the tracks. Oh, yeah, and the rivals are also identical twins. And that’s how Sadie got pregnant. The nemesis was actually pretending to be Sadie’s husband. She didn’t know that it was the evil twin. But Sadie can’t tell her husband because he’s insanely jealous; he won’t believe that it was an accident. He will feel betrayed. Oh, and Sadie is also an alien from the planet Zaphron. Which means that she will have eight babies. Because the Zaphronese always breed in litters.


OK, so none of that ACTUALLY occurred in this book, but you get the idea. The motive of the book continued to become more and more ridiculous. Any one of the motive points in the book would have been sufficient for the purpose of the story. But those points just kept coming and coming. That’s where the book lost me.


In addition, I found roughly 100 minor typos and formatting errors in this book. None of them is significant enough to distract the reader from the story, but I felt that that many errors was important to mention. I did attempt to contact the author about these errors over a month ago, but at the time of the publication of this article, I have received no response.


To summarize, this book was well-written with a nice writing style. It was not well-edited. It was also a little heavy on plot points, which made the willing suspension of disbelief a bit difficult at times.

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Christy Parker is the author of three blogs:  Ruminations from and Unkempt Mind,  Learn to Crochet - In Minutes a Day,  and You Be the Editor.

For comments, questions, notes or suggestions; Mrs. Parker can be reached in the blog specific forums on the product information pages listed above or via email at unkemptruminations@comcast.net.