WTF-Beta

Sorry for the self-plug, but I'm kind of excited about this...

A gay pastor. His world-famous violin-maker husband. Murder. Suicide. Sexual abuse, blackmail, and long-buried secrets. Church folks at their best and worst. Old-school and modern gay bars, and even a protective, mysterious drag queen, all rolled together in intriguing, tightly written mystery. What more could a person ask?

SINNER'S PRAYER
Release date April 6, 2026

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 has been 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, claiming he’s mishandled the situation.

Follow Dan and his violin-making husband Greg Zhu through a
mystery that 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?

---

PRAISE FOR SINNER'S PRAYER:

"Sinner’s Prayer is a haunting, deeply compassionate mystery about what we choose to see—and what we work hard not to. As a long-buried crime resurfaces within a church community, Dwain Lee weaves together faith, grief, and moral reckoning with quiet precision. The story lingers not just in its suspense, but in the questions it leaves behind: about trust, responsibility, and how easily the past can hide in plain sight."

• FRANK ANTHONY POLITO, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of Domestic Partners in Crime

"Sinner's Prayer is a thoughtful, gripping book that asks important questions like those its minister protagonist Dan Randolph must struggle every day to answer. In this worthy follow-up to Plausible Deception, Dwain Lee has crafted a story that takes the appealing Randolph and his equally appealing husband Greg Zhu through the fallout of decades of dark secrets, looking for the light that is the hope of every sinner's prayer.”

• MARY ANNA EVANS, Benjamin Franklin Award-winning author of The Dark Library

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The book will be available in all the usual places online - but the best possible place you could buy it is the author's website and online store, where you can pre-order the paperback and buy the ebook now:
[www.dwainlee-author.weebly.com](link url)

This brings back many memories. And I'm so sad to hear that Peggy had passed away. ️

Hah, thanks. I just thought I'd share that here, since there are some here who would know how unthinkable that would have been in the past.

Someone just got featured in an article at Daily Kos.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/3/3/2371551/-The-Sin-of-Empathy-Christian-Nationalism-Rambo-Jesus-and-heresy

DeweyLOU.bsky.social

@wtg, please add me to the list. If you don't have my email address, DM me.

Was that resurgence, or regurgitance? No thank you.

Appropriately enough, on the same night as the Orange Bowl.

Beware any government that would establish itself as the one who will define a single, officially recognized "good" form of architecture - or painting, or sculpture, or music, or literature, or religion, or morals, or newscasting, or clothing, or housing, or - well, you get the idea.

I dropped mine onto the kitchen floor the other day and pulled a muscle bending over to pick it up. Remember people, always lift from the knees.

There's no glee in any of it for me. It really isn't an issue of just the CEO and his assailant. And as dysfunctional and genuinely evil the entire U.S. for-profit healthcare delivery, pharmaceutical, and insurance complex is, it really isn't even about that. t's just the latest iteration of the age old dilemma: since the worst evil and atrocities in human history have always played out within systems that declared their actions both legal and protected, is there ever a threshold beyond which it is moral and just to work to fight the evil in ways that are declared to be illegal? And if there is such a threshold, how and where is it defined?

Just puttin' it out there - I am NOT the ChatGPT Sermonator. Mine are better - and shorter.

I'd offer a detailed reply, but it's just too damned depressing. Suffice to say that we expect our lives to change dramatically, and we've had serious conversations about what the trigger would be for us leaving.

@AdagioM go to https://www.butlerbooks.com/plausible-deception.html . You can order it directly there, and somewhere on the order page is a prompt something like "Is there anything else we need to know about your order?", special instructions, etc. In that box, just say that you'd like an autographed copy. The publisher has a box of them and will be delighted to send you one.

@AdagioM it's apparently a company that makes artificial colors for beverages. Obviously a non-stick end product, but their process uses ammonia, and a large pressurized storage vessel exploded.

@AdagioM it will eventually be available as an ebook, but it's going to be a while - I can't even give you a ballpark date at this point.

@Big_Al yes, major parts of this book, and any follow-ups, are heavily autobiographical. It isn't a total 1:1 parallel, the Dan and Greg characters are always open to some fictional nuancing for the good of the story, but weaving much personal reality into the book is very intentional. As just one example, the scene detailing Greg's terrifying incident in LAX actually happened, almost exactly as detailed in the book. In fact, it was while discussing that event post-terror when I commented, "This is the kind of thing you read about in a book, not experience in real life!" which, after thinking about it, was how the idea for the book first came about.

There was a massive explosion in a factory here around 3pm yesterday, about a mile and a half from our place. Two employees killed, a handful of others hospitalized. It blew the windows out of many buildings around the plant, and it was heard for miles. It was just down the street from where we do yoga.

@ChatGPT don't quit your day job....

Feel free to add any content you may wish. It's a virtual blank slate.