Unholy Order: A Paul Devlin Mystery

God bless William Heffernan, who shows how it is that the greatest religious scandals always result from cover-up, seldom from the scandal, per se. Two contemporary issues, secrecy about gays in the Roman Catholic priesthood and the secrecy that shrouds the operation of "Opus Christi" (no points for guessing what outfit he's sending up here), provide the framework for this well-paced novel. Heffernan also gets right the self-importance of people attached to the powerful. His rendering of the Cardinal's aide-de-camp, the numeraries in Opus Christi, and their nemesis (a humorously drawn Jesuit priest and professor at Fordham) demonstrate the bad, the ugly, and the sterling good that play out in Church politics.Ultimately, it is hard to say all that is praiseworthy about this novel without repeatedly reassuring potential readers that it does not bog down, that it never becomes polemic in its well-wrought moral points. Still, Heffernan cleverly threads throughout the plot the silliness and even wickedness of categorizing people by their bedroom activities. He reminds parents that not even the daughter of a police inspector is immune from making a stupid mistake with a stranger. The goodness of cleverness and intelligence prevailing at last over plodding intransigence and the self-interest that leads to evil is an over-arching theme, as well.Sweeping aside the ample food for thought, this is a fast-paced, zig-zagging novel that riveted my attention from the first page through the last.

One of the really funny aspects of John Grisham's novel The Firm to me was the idea that a law firm could be a Mafia front. In Unholy Order William Heffernan presents an even more diabolic relationship between a secretive Catholic order and a Columbia drug cartel.Heffernan's novel falls short only by failing to fully exploit the oppotunities the cultish criminal enterprise offers. As he draws near the end of his tale, the focus becomes concentrated on one member of Opus Dei, rather than the order itself. While this enables him to wrap up his novel, the reader wants more. In a sense Grisham had the same problem and reached for the same quick solution in The Firm with the "mail fraud" prosecution. But this book is, if anything, more artfully presented than Grisham's classic, and such a facile solution is a bigger loss to the reader.

I've been a fan of Heffernan since I read Ritual, which was the first novel to feature Paul Devlin. Unholy Order is the best one in years. I'm not going to give a plot blow by blow. That's what the book jacket is for. The story is very interesting, the characters are as real as they get. An outstanding edition to a great series!

My favorite kind of novel. I couldn't put it down. Devlin and co. always entertains as they try to solve the hardest of cases when road block after road block is thrown in their path. All the supporting cast were great, even the villains. Loved the ending. Highly recommend.

New York City Mayor Silver created a special unit within the New York Police Department, one that answers only to him. The special unit, run by Paul Dentin an inspector of detectives, takes on the political hot potato cases so high profile nobody else wants them. Paul's latest case has him pitted against the archdioceses of the Catholic Church and one of its factions, The Opus Christi. The Opus Christi, though part of the church, is a separate and very secretive sect that answers to its own leaders. When one of its minions is found with her stomach gutted because she was carrying heroin smuggled in from Columbia, the leaders won't give Paul and his team access to the nun who accompanied the victim. Four catholic priests are killed in cold blood with all of them afflicted with AIDS but the archdiocese does all in its power to block that investigation as well. Paul has to resort to some very creative police techniques to flush out the killers, especially since one of them threatened his ten-year-old daughter. William Hefferman has written a fascinating police procedural that partly uncovers the veil that hides the inner workings of the Catholic Church. There are various sub-plots that ties essentially into the main story line and the characters that populate this tale run the gamut of the human psyche. Though some readers might feel offended, most of the audience will believe that UNHOLY ORDER is the author at his talented best.Harriet Klausner