THE LETTER KILLETH

A grim tale of sex crimes, family betrayal and the Church.

In his third novel, (after Divine Lunacy, 2000, and The Fourth Trimester, 1993), criminal trial attorney and former Marine captain Gallagher heads for the courtroom to give fictional treatment to the recent sex scandals that rocked the Catholic Church. Rod “Bags” Boyle, a p.i. and former court investigator, narrates this story of one prominent California family with plenty of skeletons in the closet. When Pope John Paul II ventures from the Vatican to install Michael Hudson as the first cardinal of Orange County, Michael’s mother, Alice, celebrates the fulfillment of her years of tireless efforts to promote her son within the Church. But Alice and Michael’s beatific bubble quickly bursts when, on the very evening of his election, Sara Hudson, Michael’s sister and the top sex-crimes prosecutor in the Orange County DA’s office, issues a warrant for the arrest of Father Ignatius Bartel for the sexual assault of several altar boys–one of whom is Sara’s son. Sara aggressively pursues the Orange County big-wigs who knowingly transferred a pedophilic priest from parish to parish, and–surprise!–it turns out that the head of the pack was then-Bishop Michael Hudson. Sara immediately orders his arrest, and the resultant trial proceedings grow increasingly complicated as Bags airs decades of the Hudson family’s dirty laundry. Despite the ridiculously internecine plot, the driving narrative holds the reader hostage until the end.

Da Vinci Code devotees–as well as those interested in the machinations of the Catholic clergy–will devour this macabre account of what happens when ambition collides with the brutal reality of the sexual abuse of children.