Sitting at a fine hardwood table in a well-appointed house overlooking Penn Cove, two retired Episcopalian women might be expected to be sipping tea while discussing the day’s events.

Not so with Shirley Viall and Mary Witzel. The two long-time North Whidbey residents who met at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church a quarter century ago are plotting murder and letting their imaginations roam from the Soviet Union to China, Vietnam and finally Seattle, where the murder takes place.

The killing of an apparent seaman on a downtown street is the nexus around which a complex plot swirls, drawing in the CIA, various military players, and an assortment of spies, bureaucrats, lawyers, crooked cops, communists, politicians and street criminals.

Throw in an inspirational Chinese priest, a proud widow struggling to learn how her heroic husband really died in Vietnam and an enterprising newspaper reporter, and you’ve got yourself the makings of a novel.

All it takes to pull it off is years of research, painstaking character development, and the ability to work collaboratively on something so creative and personal as a novel.

It is perhaps a surprising subject matter for the women, but both have strong memories of the Vietnam war, having worked with military returnees from that 10-year exercise in foreign futility. Witzel worked as a civilian at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, and Viall worked at the University of Washington. They knew a lot of veterans, and knew that many others never returned from the war.

That’s why the name of their book is “While Rome was Sleeping.” As they see it, the government went to sleep as the war wound down, pretending they weren’t abandoning any Americans in Southeast Asia. But they did, and the book is the two authors’ fictional account of how that happened, based on their personal contacts and extensive research.

“Everybody just walked away,” Viall said. “There were so many left behind.” She quietly adds, “I lost someone very close in Vietnam.”

The end result is an impressive tome of 270 8-by-11 inch pages. But don’t look for it in the library or in the book store. It hasn’t been published yet. The authors are still in the process of trying to market it. But the main point is that they wrote it.

“It will be published,” Witzel said.

“We feel confident,” Viall added.

One person who has read “While Rome was Sleeping” is Linda McNamara, an Oak Harbor resident who heads the library’s Mystery Lovers Book Club.

“Aren’t they something!,” McNamara said of the two authors. “I loved the book, they really got me involved in the characters and I was sorry when it ended. And it wasn’t ‘they all lived happily ever after’.”

The women weren’t aiming for an unrealistically happy ending to their complex story. It concluded with a combination of happiness, sadness and justice done and undone.

“Bodice-rippers are not exactly our style,” Viall said. “We wanted to so something with some meat on it.”

They’re already working on their second novel.

Each Friday, schedules permitting, they sit at Mary Witzel’s dining room table, each armed with a notebook and pen. “Letters to the Editor,” is the name of the new book, featuring some of the main characters from “When Rome was Sleeping.” This time the setting is in Eastern Washington and the newspaper editor has a serial killer on his hands.

“His name is Rolf Schwartz,” said Vail. “He was born in 1940 on a farm in Ritzville … he’s a janitor, so he has lots of freedom to move around.”

Witzel interjects, “He calls himself Omni … he’s a sociopath, he murders pretty early in the story.” And the plot will continue from there. When they’re done for the day, Witzel takes their ideas and puts them in the computer, adding another page or two to the novel.

The women became co-novelists one day when they were chatting and discovered that each had been working on separate writing projects. They decided to join forces, but didn’t immediately realize what they were getting themselves into.

“To write the first one it took three years, and a lot of research,” Witzel said. They work easily together, listening to one another’s ideas and making additions or suggestions.

“We brainstorm, we jot everything down, and eventually there’s a thread that fits,” Witzel said. “We can’t really explain it.”

So far there’s only been one murder in “Letters to the Editor,” but it’s early yet. We can only hope that Omni doesn’t get the newspaper editor.