Snow Globes and Hand Grenades

Eight long years of grade school and nuns is about to end in freedom. Graduation! But only if Mimi Maloney and her classmates Patrick and Tony can outsmart investigators who suspect, and rightly so, they’re guilty of the worst crime ever in parish history.

Mimi Maloney, an average student who never gets in trouble, shows her genius in love and crime in this tale of Catholic school kids enduring the last two weeks of eighth grade. Police and church investigators conspire to learn who put the stolen snow globe paperweight in the hand of Mary on the church roof, and suspicion falls on Mimi’s classmates, Patrick Cantwell and his best friend Tony. A comic panorama of parish life in the 1970s, when lying to get out of trouble was considered a sacred art form, because, after all, wasn’t President Nixon lying too? In this suspenseful, laugh-filled sequel to Never Hug a Nun and Try to Kiss a Girl, award-winning author Kevin Killeen gives us a caper plot of flawed heroes and lovable villains that packs the comic blast of that old hand grenade dad brought home from the war and that illustrates childish daydreams all too often have adult, real-life consequences.

Kevin Killeen of St. Louis, MO

A comic novelist who writes about family life, growing up and Catholic schools, Kevin Killeen has won awards for humor in his first two books, Never Hug a Nun and Try to Kiss a Girl. By day Killeen has worked since 1995 as a reporter for CBS Radio in St. Louis, covering crime, politics and human interest features. He has also written and directed some twenty humorous, full-length radio plays for the KMOX Holiday Radio Show. In his third novel, Snow Globes and Hand Grenades, Killeen for the first time put the boys in the background and tells a story whose main character is a girl, and in this latest novel,  Most Improved Sophomore, he tells the tale from multiple points of view.