OUR SONG, MEMENTO MORI

A priest tries to discover the reason for a firefighter’s suicide attempt in this novel.

After 11 years in the priesthood, Father Jamie Bluterre still hasn’t found his calling. Attached to New York’s Our Lady of Sorrows Parish, he considers this assignment his last opportunity to prove he deserves to wear his collar. He has been ordered by his superior to receive the confession of 55-year-old firefighter Sean “Duke” Ducotty, who lies comatose in a hospital with a bullet lodged in his brain from an attempted suicide. Doctors assume Duke is brain dead, but he can actually hear everything that goes on around him, trapped like a prisoner in his own body. He is also visited by visions of Valerie Dunn, his feisty former lover. Father Blu seeks to uncover the cause of Duke’s suicide attempt and, thereby, hopefully, to save the man’s soul. “I want to understand—the church wants to understand—if he was fully responsible or even responsible at all for his action,” he explains to Duke’s former battalion chief. “What was his state of mind when he did this?” Meanwhile, Duke relives the events that led to the fateful act, scouring them for meaning. The two haunted men, one sleeping, one awake, seek to unravel the mystery of Duke and Valerie, a series of arsons, and the musical clues that the firefighter lay scattered behind him. Lengsfelder’s prose is moody and dreamlike, particularly Duke’s comatose ruminations: “In those drugged hours, Val came, half woman half moth; great ochre wings challenging the emptiness, with the grace of a flame and the will of a raptor, dragging me back into the light, into the fluorescent hospital room with the bleached shapes, that once again became doctors circling me.” The novel unfolds slowly, and while the premise is wonderfully evocative, readers will quickly get the sense that the author is struggling to make Duke more compelling and mysterious than he actually is. There’s only so much romance that can be squeezed from the lives of these aging New Yorkers, many of whom seem to chafe under the noirish framing. Even so, the book is often compelling, and Father Blu is an oddly dynamic and vulnerable detective as he tries to salvage Duke’s soul—and his own.

An imperfect but highly readable mystery built around a man in a coma.