Mother of God (Wally Winchester Series Book 3)
by Jack Gunter (Author)
An obsessed antique picker, a UNESCO cultural theft inspector, and a pint sized female killing machine from the Amazon team up onboard a Siberian train to save the icon that can unite the Russian people with its miracles.
In book 3, a mission oak chair in the basement of an old state mental hospital leads Wally Winchester to take a job as a substitute voc ed teacher so he can snoop around for vintage Stickley furniture. After a rocky initiation to the world of defiant students and narrow-minded administrators, he invents an eBay class that opens a new world to the wayward youngsters but puts him at odds with the Secretary of Schools, a rigid ex-marine who has an eye for his wife. In the endpapers of an old leather-bound atlas he finds in the old estate library Wally finds a cryptic inscription that sends him to eastern Russia in search of the Kazanskaya, the Mother of God of Kazan, known as the protectress of Russia and believed lost in a turn-of-the-century fire. With the prize of a lifetime in his possession he faces a five-day train ride to Moscow that turns into a circus of danger and deception as he rides a rumor wave spreading across the Russian homeland that something wonderful is about to occur.