Petra Delicado, the protagonist of Bartlett’s novels, has married an architect who has no fewer than four children.
Petra thus finds herself juggling her duties as a police detective, a marital venture she desperately wants to succeed, and relations with stepchildren backed by her husband’s irascible ex-wives.
Into this fraught domestic arrangement intrudes a complex and mysterious case: inside a convent, a friar is murdered and the body of a blessed man, venerated as a relic, is spirited away.
Unable to make sense of the crime, Petra pursues numerous leads, assisted—or more accurately, steered—by one of the convent’s nuns, who conceals a terrible secret.
The novel moves along sluggishly, somewhat limp, alternating the police investigation with protracted conversations between Petra and the Mother Superior, depictions of life at the precinct, and domestic tensions that gradually give way to a cheerful, serene environment.
In the end, the mystery is solved purely by chance, leaving the reader weary and disappointed rather than surprised.
As in all her novels, Bartlett tackles themes far beyond the boundaries of the detective genre: in this case, the arcana of conventual life and of the Catholic Church more generally, as well as the tribulations of living together in a complex, blended family.
As for her anticlericalism, the author makes her stance immediately clear, defining Catholics as

those who haven’t recovered from the traumas of a Catholic education, those who live perpetually imprisoned by guilt.
In a word: poor wretches

.
As for cohabitation, the struggles of a couple’s relationship are summed up as follows:

Marcos and I were there, united before the law but separated by the incommensurable divide between the worlds in which we moved

Why not read it? As a detective story, it is weak and dull; as an account of social milieus and human emotions, its contents are far too superficial to hold the reader’s interest.
Its sole merit is a pleasant prose style, even if it leans too heavily on dialogue—especially between Petra and her colleague Garzón; but then, why don’t the two of them just get married?

The silence of the cloisters