Now a widow in her seventies, Katherine Forrester Vigneras returns to New York City in retirement from concert touring in Europe.

The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, which figures prominently in the plot of A Severed Wasp, is also the setting for the 1968 L'Engle novel The Young Unicorns.

[1] The title comes from a quote found in a book review by George Orwell: I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp.

L'Engle's characters comment on this, even as the events of the novel dramatize the problem: "It's all too easy to see the Church in that image, the greedy wasp unaware of its brokenness.

Characters associated with the Cathedral perpetrate and suffer from "blackmail, threatening phone calls, violence, drugs, jealousy, and revenge motives."

Though wounded and imperfect, L'Engle finds value in the Cathedral community's capacity for (in Chase's words) "understanding, compassion, forgiveness and acceptance."