January 14, 2021
Faith Fairchild set her phone down with the first sigh of relief she had felt for almost eight months… A call from her younger sister Hope almost a year ago had marked a very different feeling: the onslaught of fear. Nothing had been normal since.

Faith has just learned that her husband, the Reverend Thomas Fairchild, is about to receive the vaccine, eligible early as a chaplain at the VA hospital. On March 6, 2020, I began what I called a Covid Journal, jotting down a few words each day with details about what I was doing to keep us going in mind and body. I had not intended to write a book using these notes, but over the course of the pandemic I began to realize I needed to chronicle the Fairchild’s, and our, journey. The messages I received from people rereading the books or discovering them for the first time were truly shots in the arm. I decided to start with the hope the vaccine gave and build on it—that we were all in this together. The Select Board in my Massachusetts town strung a banner across the main road with these words and I put the same act in the book.

Happily, murder was not dealt with in the journal, yet I found myself thinking about how Faith Fairchild would investigate one. I had changed the way I shopped for groceries, interacted with people, got my hair cut—it grew far down my back the way it had been in college! So why not have Faith change her normal methods of solving crimes? She turns to technology, learning to Zoom etc. The crime itself was enabled by the dark side of the Web.

When we began to emerge from isolation in varying degrees, I became fascinated by the stories people told about their experiences and wove these into the book. Ben Fairchild, at college, and Amy Fairchild, a high school senior became a Pod at home with their parents, learning remotely with social interactions limited to their screens as well. I spoke to teachers I knew, and parents, about remote learning’s effects. We will be feeling the negative aspects for years. Time lost, literally.

A subplot involves a young woman who has had to postpone her elaborate June wedding and her plans to have a honeymoon baby. 2022 saw 2.5 million weddings, the most in forty years, due to the pandemic backlog. Another ripple effect I write about is the way older people had to cope with Covid, describing how a character in other books, Millicent Revere McKinley, faces severe food and fuel insecurity in isolation.

We made do. We came through and many of us discovered things about ourselves and others to treasure—things we may have known, but not known to hold even closer. One widespread discovery was cooking—out of necessity and then with pleasure. Sour dough starters! Beer Bread!—who knew yeast would disappear from the shelves along with paper goods?

As in the book, I’ll end this with: As we enter in what is being termed, “Living with Covid”, my wish for you, dear readers, is that we hold on to hope—and in every way possible, each other. Altogether.

The Body in the Web, A Faith Fairchild Mystery Book #26
Genre: Cozy
Release: May 2023
Format: Print, Digital, Audio
Purchase Link

In the 26th book in the award-winning Faith Fairchild Mysteries series, Katherine Hall Page’s beloved amateur detective is hunkered down with her family during the pandemic when a Zoom-bombing scandal sends the community into a tailspin … and a dead body is discovered.

Faith Fairchild joins the rest of the world in lockdown mode when reality flips in March 2020. As the pandemic spreads, Faith and her family readjust to life together in Aleford, Massachusetts. Her husband, Tom, continues his sermons from Zoom; their children, Ben, who’s in college, and Amy, a high school senior, are doing remote learning at home.

Faith is happy to have her family under the same roof and grateful for her resilient community, friends, and neighbors in Aleford. Town halls remain lively and well-attended, despite residents joining from their living rooms. It is at one of these town halls that scandal breaks out. In the midst of a Zoom meeting, damaging images suddenly flash upon everyone’s screens. Claudia, local art teacher and Faith’s dear friend, is immediately recognized as the woman who has been targeted.

When Claudia is later discovered dead, Faith, with the help of her friends, journeys deep into the dark web to unravel the threads of Claudia’s mysterious history and shocking passing.

About the author
Katherine Hall Page is the award-winning writer of the Faith Fairchild series (Wm Morrow/Avon), a recipient of the Agatha for Best First, Best Short Story, and Best Mystery Novel as well as other Agatha, Edgar, Mary Higgins Clark, and Maine Literary Awards nominees. She received Malice Domestic’s Lifetime Achievement Award and another—Crime Master—from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. The Body in the Web is the 26th in the series. She has also published a cookbook, Have Faith in your Kitchen, and books for YAs and Middle Grade readers. A New Jersey native, she lives in Massachusetts and Maine. Connect with Katherine at katherine-hall-page.org.

All comments are welcomed.