JUDAS PRIEST

Father Dowling's quiet days at the rectory of St. Hilary's Church in Fox River, Illinois (The Basket Case, etc.), are dramatically interrupted one morning by the appearance of his one- time fellow seminarian Christopher Burke. Burke had been a priest and his wife Janet a nun when they broke away to become the gurus of a movement called Enlightened Hedonism, in which they scorned the tenets of Catholicism and preached (to great financial profit) the joys of sexual freedom. Now their grown daughter Sonja is threatening to enter a convent, and, as Father Dowling later learns, Janet is threatening divorce. Worse is to follow, with the murder of Sonja, whose body is discovered in the battered Toyota of seedy lawyer Tuttle, and the purported suicide of Craig Wilhelms, Burke's right-hand man. There's little sleuthing craft expended in turning up the murderer but considerable cleverness in Father Dowling's successful resistance to being added to the list of victims. Some non-boring religious love, mostly unhackneyed characters, and a lively flow of events make for one of the better efforts in this series.