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Winter, 1933. Kitty Underhay is enjoying a restorative break from sleuthing on a visit to her family at Enderley Hall. The only thing marring her peace - aside from the uncomfortable sensation she has of being watched - is the obvious history between her beau, ex-army captain Matthew Bryant and another guest, the beautiful Juliet Vanderstafen. So, when the parish clerk is found dead on her front doorstep, Kitty leaps at the chance of distraction.

Over a century ago, God's United Reich, a tyrannical religious ideology, conquered the American Republic, transforming it into a holy utopia. The heart of this oppressive regime is the Divine Leader and his unwavering military force called the NiBorr, which demands unquestioning obedience from its flock. Leon Grady has the perceived holy life: he's the star of his high school baseball team and is surrounded by adoring friends and a family who love him, all while dating the girl next door. Yet, deep inside, he knows he can never really be happy because of who he is and what his heart wants.

Herman Melville is now seen as one of the great figures in American literature, a man who expanded the role of the novel and gave new and complex depths to the meaning of a story. His best work uses the form of the novel or the story as a means of carrying and discussing concerns about the nature of humanity, the role of God, and a sometimes satiric, sometimes bitter, examination of colonialism and capitalism.

Considered to be the least characteristic of Melville's stories, somewhat resembling the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, The Bell-Tower is a dark literary work that explores, though never fully reveals, its central mystery. An eccentric artist and architect dreams up plans for a magnificent bell tower. After receiving approval from the city, he happily begins construction. When city residents begin to notice strange occurrences associated with the project, their complaints eventually force the city magistrates to investigate.

"The Bell-Tower" appeared in 1855 in Putnam's Monthly Magazine no. 32 (August). In the south of Europe, nigh a once frescoed capital, now with dank mould cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at distance, seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten days, with Anak and the Titan.