Clare Fergusson is a different kind of fictional sleuth, a breed apart from the tough cops and hard-boiled, tight-lipped gumshoes that populate many crime mysteries.

Fergusson is a newly ordained Episcopal priest serving St. Alban’s. It’s a small, conservative parish in Millers Kill, N.Y., a town set in the New York Adirondacks.

She brings her own spiritual perspective to solving cases.

“One of the reasons I write mysteries is that Clare approaches these sometimes really horrific examples of human evil from the perspective not of grabbing the bad guy and taking him off to jail, but from the perspective of someone who is trying to heal and reconcile,” says Julia Spencer-Fleming, who cast Fergusson as the protagonist in her first mystery, “In the Bleak Midwinter.”

“A lot of crime fiction deals primarily with who is the bad guy, how do we find the bad guy and does the bad guy get punished? That’s a very important part, and you find that in all my novels. But I’m also interested in finding out how bad deeds affect the lives of everybody involved, not just the victim.”

With the critical and commercial success of Spencer-Fleming’s first book, Clare Fergusson is bound to have more mysteries to solve.

The author, who lives outside Portland, Maine, is traveling across the country to promote “A Fountain Filled with Blood,” her second mystery featuring the Clare Fergusson character.

Spencer-Fleming is already at work on the third installment of the series. Tentatively titled “Out of the Deep I Cry,” the manuscript is due to be finished in August.

On Monday, the author will visit Lawrence. She’ll speak and sign her book, “A Fountain Filled with Blood,” at Trinity Episcopal Church, 1011 Vt.

“I will be talking about my books and writing and about Clare. People are really fascinated with her as a character and the idea of the fairly young female priest who is struggling with a lot of questions in her life,” says Spencer-Fleming, a lifelong Episcopalian.

More realistic scenario

It’s not all that unusual for writers to use the literary convention of a cleric on the case of a crime.

“There’s actually a tradition of clergy members in crime fiction. A lot of them have been Catholic priests. The most famous one — and the oldest — is G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, who was sleuthing in the 1940s,” she says.

More recently, there is Harry Kemelman’s well-known mystery series featuring Rabbi David Small, set in Massachusetts. The first book in that series is “Friday the Rabbi Slept Late.”

“If you think about it, when you’re writing a mystery with an amateur sleuth, you have one very important hurdle to get over for the reader: Why is this person getting involved in solving a crime?” Spencer-Fleming says.

“In real life, unless you’re paid to, you don’t go out and find who killed your neighbor. But having a cleric as the sleuth, clerics are expected to get involved in people’s lives during crisis points. They knows things about your family that other people don’t, and they’re called to be there doing things for people. It’s a good device; it makes a more realistic scenario for an amateur sleuth.”

There are few crime mysteries featuring an Episcopal priest, though. Spencer-Fleming knows of only one other series with such a character, the Lily Connor mysteries written by Michelle Blake.

In Blake’s debut novel, “The Tentmaker,” Connor is a 36-year-old interim rector in a Boston church.

“Her books are not set in one parish like mine are. Blake’s premise is that her main character is a substitute priest,” Spencer-Fleming says.

Why did the author choose to create Clare Fergusson as a member of the clergy?

“Having as a protagonist someone who’s job is to pick up the pieces of these broken lives makes it more interesting to me than if it were just a police office tracking down and apprehending him or her,” she says.

Priest who ‘kicks butt’

Spencer-Fleming’s first effort, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” has been warmly received by mystery lovers and highly regarded by book critics.

Her then-unpublished manuscript beat out 250 other works to win the 2001 St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Contest for Best First Traditional Mystery.

“That’s how it got published,” she says.

The book has also won the 2003 Dilys Award, given by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association to the book its members most enjoyed selling throughout the year.

And it has recently won the Agatha Award for Best First Mystery. Named for Agatha Christie, the honor is presented annually at the Malice Domestic Convention in Washington, D.C., a prestigious mystery conference.

Spencer-Fleming’s series featuring Clare Fergusson obviously has broad appeal among fiction readers.

“You don’t have to be Episcopalian to ‘get it.’ In fact, you don’t even have to be a believer. Everybody should be able to pick up one of my books for a page-turning, heart-pounding mystery, and there’s just a little sugar pill of spirituality going down at the same time,” she says.

The books are proving particularly popular among fellow members of her denomination.

“I’ve got the e-mails from priests and seminarians and other Episcopalians,” she says. “They like Clare a lot. They enjoy seeing a priest who is portrayed with all her fallibilities, as well as all her dedication. And it tickles priests to see another priest who ‘kicks butt.'”