“Hamill is better known as one of our greatest chroniclers of New York City. In this, his first novel, rereleased on its fiftieth anniversary, he goes all hard-boiled noir, telling the story of a disaffected American priest and a plot to kill the pope.” New York Times Book Review
Description
Rome. Holy Thursday. A limousine carrying two pilgrims speeds toward the city. Rail, an American publisher, an obese voluptuary, perspires in the heat and shivers with the icy premonition of death. His companion, Harwell, is running a cold fever of bigotry and violence, self-indulgence and sadism: he is an American Nazi. The two must separate soon, must not be seen together, for they are to be the instruments of a public murder.
Rail meets Father Malloy, who is to show him around the city. Malloy had been a chaplain in Vietnam, and he had seen too many people die. He is not aware of the murder Rail carries with him. This is to be a murder of world-shaking consequence. It is a plot on a grand scale, conceived by men of secret power: a sin-crazed, aging cardinal and a powerful Italian count. For them, Rail and Harwell are only acolytes in a monstrous ceremony; Malloy, awash in doubts about himself and his religious faith, is drawn into the drama.
In A Killing for Christ, Pete Hamill steps behind the public face of the modern Church and sees the dark grottoes within. He examines the hidden hearts of priests and prostitutes, the tortured windings of perverted thinking, the orgies of the bored and the bitter. Within the passage of the four days most holy to the Church, he traces the malignant progress of a blasphemous conspiracy to the taut moment of its ultimate act and redeems from it a unique understanding of man and of faith.
Praise
“Hamill is better known as one of our greatest chroniclers of New York City. In this, his first novel, rereleased on its fiftieth anniversary, he goes all hard-boiled noir, telling the story of a disaffected American priest and a plot to kill the pope.” New York Times Book Review
“A fast-paced, topical thriller…Hamill’s prose is stylishly punchy.” New York Times
“The style and substance of this first novel owes much to hardboiled, gutsy, private-eye fiction and to a general submersion into obscenity and violence.” Kirkus Reviews
Details
| Language | English |
|---|---|
| Release Day | Mar 5, 2018 |
| Release Date | March 6, 2018 |
| Release Date Machine | 1520294400 |
| Imprint | Blackstone Publishing |
| Provider | Blackstone Publishing |
| Categories | Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Literature & Fiction, Thriller & Suspense, Suspense, Fiction - All, Fiction - Adult |
Author Bio
Pete Hamill is a novelist, journalist, editor, and screenwriter. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling novels Forever and Snow in August and the bestselling memoir A Drinking Life. He writes a column for the New York Daily News and lives in New York City.
Narrator Bio
Keith Szarabajka has appeared in many films, including The Dark Knight, Missing, and A Perfect World, and on such television shows as The Equalizer, Angel, Cold Case, Golden Years, and Profit. Szarabajka has also appeared in several episodes of Selected Shorts for National Public Radio. He won the 2001 Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction for his reading of Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and has won several Earphones Awards.
Overview
Rome. Holy Thursday. A limousine carrying two pilgrims speeds toward the city. Rail, an American publisher, an obese voluptuary, perspires in the heat and shivers with the icy premonition of death. His companion, Harwell, is running a cold fever of bigotry and violence, self-indulgence and sadism: he is an American Nazi. The two must separate soon, must not be seen together, for they are to be the instruments of a public murder.
Rail meets Father Malloy, who is to show him around the city. Malloy had been a chaplain in Vietnam, and he had seen too many people die. He is not aware of the murder Rail carries with him. This is to be a murder of world-shaking consequence. It is a plot on a grand scale, conceived by men of secret power: a sin-crazed, aging cardinal and a powerful Italian count. For them, Rail and Harwell are only acolytes in a monstrous ceremony; Malloy, awash in doubts about himself and his religious faith, is drawn into the drama.
In A Killing for Christ, Pete Hamill steps behind the public face of the modern Church and sees the dark grottoes within. He examines the hidden hearts of priests and prostitutes, the tortured windings of perverted thinking, the orgies of the bored and the bitter. Within the passage of the four days most holy to the Church, he traces the malignant progress of a blasphemous conspiracy to the taut moment of its ultimate act and redeems from it a unique understanding of man and of faith.
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