Excerpt from The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

At four o'clock, the black hearse pulled up. The three women watched from the bedroom window. Mr. Sheen, elegant in his long overcoat, left the cab first and was the first to appear upstairs. He was a tall man with the sharp nose and high cheekbones of an Indian chief, a pair of large, heavy-lidded eyes that couldn't have been better suited to his profession. He swept off his hat and took the widow's two hands into his own and, with a quick look around the sparsely furnished room, suggested the lady and the two nuns might want to wait in the bedroom while he made his preparations. Annie and Sister Jeanne sat together at the foot of the bed while Sister St. Saviour stood at the door. They could hear Mr. Sheen giving instructions. And then the unmistakable sound of the coffin being carried up the stairs, a bit of labored breathing, and the touch of the wooden casket against the doorframe. And then Mr. Sheen rapped on the bedroom door to say all was ready.

The husband's face was pale and waxen, but it was, nevertheless, a lovely face. Boyish and solemn above the starched white collar, with a kind of youthful stubbornness about it as well. The look of a child, Sister St. Saviour thought, when met with the spoon of castor oil.

While Annie and Sister Jeanne knelt, Sister St. Saviour blessed herself and considered the sin of her deception, slipping a suicide into hallowed ground. A man who had rejected his life, the love of this brokenhearted girl, the child coming to them in the summer. She said to God, who knew her thoughts, Hold it against me if You will. He could put this day on the side of the ledger where all her sins were listed: the hatred she felt for certain politicians, the money she stole from her own basket to give out as she pleased—to a girl with a raging clap, to the bruised wife of a drunk, to the mother of the thumb-sized infant she had wrapped in a clean handkerchief, baptized, and then buried in the convent garden. All the moments of how many days when her compassion failed, her patience failed, when her love for God's people could not outrun the girlish alacrity of her scorn for their stupidity, their petty sins.

She wanted him buried in Calvary to give comfort to his poor wife, true. To get the girl what she'd paid for. But she also wanted to prove herself something more than a beggar, to test the connections she'd forged in this neighborhood, forged over a lifetime. She wanted him buried in Calvary because the power of the Church wanted him kept out and she, who had spent her life in the Church's service, wanted him in.

Hold it against the good I've done, she prayed. We'll sort it out when I see You.

Only a few neighbors came to call, every one of them a little restrained in sympathy, given the unspoken notion that the son of a bitch could have taken them all with him. A trio of red-faced motormen stopped by, but stayed only a minute when no drink was offered. Later, the two nuns walked Mr. Sheen downstairs in order to give the girl some time alone with her husband. At the curb, he reached into the cab of the hearse and pulled out the day's newspaper. He folded back a page and tapped a narrow article. Sister St. Saviour leaned forward to read, Sister Jeanne at her elbow. In the descending light of the cold evening, the blur of a misting rain and a rising fog, the two could just make out the headline: SUICIDE ENDANGERS OTHERS. It was followed by the full report of the fire and the man's death by his own hand. "There's nothing to be done, Sister," Mr. Sheen whispered. "Now that it's in the paper, there's not a Catholic cemetery that will have him. I'll have my head handed to me on a plate if I try to bring him into the church."

To Sister Jeanne's eyes, the black newsprint, especially the bold headline that seemed to swell and blur under the blow of each raindrop, briefly transformed the world itself into a thing made of paper, pocked by tears.

Excerpted from The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott. Copyright © 2017 by Alice McDermott. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.