LAST THINGS

More unrest among the ranks of the nontenured and no-longer-ordained.

When pompous, arrogant Horst Cassirer, who prefers writing arcane articles for esoteric little magazines to actually teaching students at St. Edmund’s College, insists he be considered for early tenure, the English department splits three to two against him. Cassirer lambastes tenure committee member Andrew Bernardo and threatens to take him to court, but this is hardly Andrew’s main worry. His popular novelist sister Jessica is about to base her next book on family history; his brother Raymond, an ex-priest now living with an ex-nun in California, has returned to Chicago to reconcile, perhaps, with their critically ill father; and his twice-widowed aunt Eleanor is conniving to go through his father’s papers in search of old love letters she sent her first husband’s brother, the dying Fulvio. Low-key Father Ralph Dowling (Prodigal Father, 2002, etc.) doesn’t make much effort to dissuade Jessica from blabbing the family secrets or to convince Fulvio, who left the church as a protest when Raymond was laicized, to make a final confession before death calls. Unfortunately, death takes not only Fulvio (natural causes) but Cassirer (baseball bat). Worse, Andrew, who finds the second body at his doorstep, decides to move it, making himself prime suspect.

Amusing professorial infighting and the occasional murder take a backseat to McInerny’s true concerns: dwindling seminary enrollment and the decline of faith-based education.