Clouds Without Rain

One  hot August day college professor  Michael Braden is  driving an Amish single horse vintage buggy up and down the rural lanes  in a central valley of Ohio. He is playing decoy  and is wearing the shiny blue  denim pants and solid sky blue shirt covered by a black vest. He is already white haired and bearded  as nature has already made him. He moonlights as a sheriff's deputy when he can help out. He is trying to catch the two teenagers who are  local highway man in masks out to scare as well as steal and plunder from local Amish buggy riders.

After his short sojourns along the far from busy byways he returns the simple vehicle and gets into his own car just in time to be sent to the site of a multiple fatality accident. Among the dead are another member of the sheriffs department, a young man in a car, the driver of the semi which fishtailed and jackknifed  and was the immediate cause of the  accident , a man driving  a buggy and the horse.

The title of this book comes from the Bible. It is from Jude who refers to people who are self-involved.                "These shepherd to feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn tree's, without food and uprooted – twice dead."

Specifically it refers to JR Weaver who has been killed in this buggy accident. He had become a very liberal   member of the Amish faith and wasa real estate developer. He used electricity, telephones and fax machines but still drove a simple horse and buggy.







There has been a new more conservative Bishop elected in the district who wanted to change back to the old ways and there was some dissention about who of the group would chose to stay. There were also rumblings about shady land deals which were costing many families their farms and Weaver was behind this. Was there more to the fatal accident?

Professor Michael Braden, Pastor Cal Troyer and Sheriff Robinson work together to find the answers. It is a difficult path that the Amish must follow as farms become too expensive to own and keeping the faith becomes increasingly difficult when these folk must pursue jobs in towns or in doing work that is tourist oriented.

This is an excellent series and I learn a bit from each book. In one scene a woman scrubs her floor with a strip of 2x2 wood covered with cloth wrapped around it so that a new area of cloth is available when an area becomes soiled. I might just try that.