The Pot Thief Who Studied Calvin

The Pot Thief Who Studied Calvin was published last month. It is author J. Michael Orenduff's 10th Pot Thief murder mystery. The series features an antique seller who specializes in ancient works of clay and porcelain. Each installment of the series is titled "The Pot Thief Who Studied.  . ." It’s an interesting premise for a series. 

The publisher's summary: 

An Albuquerque ceramics dealer soon turns amateur sleuth after he gets a 3D-printed pot to die for.

Hubie Schuze usually digs through the dirt—often illegally—to find the ancient ceramics he sells in his shop, Spirits in Clay. But thanks to his nephew, Tristan, a computer science student at the University of New Mexico, Hubie receives a unique 3D-printed pot. And after a photo of it runs in the local paper, it becomes a popular item.

Unfortunately, the pot is sought-after by all the wrong people, and strange characters start darkening the doorway of Hubie’s shop. They’re willing to do anything to get their hands on the pot, and after Det. Whit Fletcher summons Hubie to the morgue, he discovers that includes murder. Now, to get to the bottom of things, Hubie must uncover what's so hot about this pot, before the cold-as-ice-killer strikes again. 

I wasn't expecting this story to be a cozy mystery but that's exactly what it is. Our amateur sleuth sells ceramic pots in between telling one joke after another. He is an expert on Calvin, Ross Calvin that is, but had to learn the finer points on John Calvin's predestination theory for his soon to be father-in-law. Ross Calvin wrote Sky Determines: an Interpretation of the Southwest, one of Hubie’s favorite books. This Calvin was a real-life Episcopalian priest whose 1934 book is a classic of New Mexico literature. He also was an adherent on predestination.

The story opened with a prologue at the local Albuquerque morgue where Hubie was present to identify the body. The story then shifts backwards in time to explain how the body ended up there. The first third of the book did not include a murder and I was getting anxious for it to happen so that I could read about the investigation. However, it came more than halfway through the story. The "investigation" consisted of the big reveal where Hubie explained every part of the case to a group of all the possible suspects. 

I had never heard of 3D-printers before. The author gives a good presentation of how they work early in the story. 

"It can operate in several ways. The one I used sets the printer to run its stylus over the surface of an object you want to copy. The movements of the stylus are stored in the printer’s memory. Then you have it follow the pattern of the object it now has in its memory, but this time it’s laying down soft clay as it goes, so it makes an exact duplicate of the object it traced.”

The book ends with a discussion between Hubie and his new bride whether the deceased's death was predestined. This story began and ended with the merits of predestination, which I had originally assumed given the title of the book. Pretty interesting. 

5 out of 5 stars.