ADVOCATUS DIABOLI IBD

Sinopse

Many Words Press-an imprint of Able Muse Press-is proud to introduceáAdvocatus Diaboliáof the Catholic Themes, initiating a new series by the author of the popular Jack Colt mystery series: Advocatus Diaboliáis the story of a murder mystery caught up in a canonization cause. International in scope, it unravels though Washington, DC, Rome, the Vatican, Ireland, and elsewhere. It interrogates the making and makeup of a Modern-day saint, juxtaposed to forces for good or ill working to upend or uphold the cause, in the backdrop of the day-to-day failings or goodness of its cast of characters and hagiographies of related saints of the past.áAdvocatus Diaboliáis spellbinding as the best mystery novels and spiritually fulfilling in ways few of them could hope to, or even, care to achieve.PRAISE FORáADVOCATUS DIABOLI:ItâÇÖs much easier to depict wickedness than sanctity, vice than virtue. ItâÇÖs much easier to portray a whiskey priest than a genuine believable saint. The reason is simple. ItâÇÖs difficult to depict sanctity without succumbing to either the saccharin or the preachy. William Baer has shown himself a consummate novelist in the manner in which goodness is portrayed without preachiness in this gritty tour de force of a story, which has as many twists and turns as the finest page-turning mystery story. This is fiction at its finest.- Joseph Pearce, author ofáThe Quest for ShakespeareFrom the opening pages of William BaerâÇÖsáAdvocatus Diaboliástraight through to its moving conclusion, the reader is irrevocably hooked. This is a brave novel and a brave novelist, unafraid to address the unfashionable questions of faith and doubt, to posit the possibility (though never the certainty) of an immanent divinity at work in the lives of ordinary men and women, the human need for grace, and the power of redemptive suffering to save us from ourselves and each other. Baer writes in the tradition of Graham Greene, Walker Percy, Andre Dubus, and Ron Hansen, among others-Catholic fiction writers each of whom says 'No! in thunder' to both the nihilism and easy belief of his era. Compelling and credible, Baer has given us that rare gift-a clear-eyed, intelligent, religious novel that eschews the pieties of doubters and unthinking believers alike.- Angela Alaimo OâÇÖDonnell, author ofáAndalusian Hours: PoemsBaer draws characters who face a world larger, stranger, and more vast than they at first know. Its sharp edges and fleshly longings are confused and influenced by forces modernity would like to ignore-ones of both great evil and divine good, that in the words of Solzhenistsyn, ultimately lie not in the physical world at all, but cut right through the center of every human heart.- A. G. Harmon, author ofáSome Bore Gifts: StoriesABOUT THE AUTHOR:William Baeráis the author of thirty books includingáTimes Square and Other Stories, Psalter: A Sequence of Catholic Sonnets, Classic American Films: Conversations with the Screenwriters, Lu¡s de Camões: Selected Sonnetsá(translations from the Portuguese), and the Jack Colt Mystery series,áNew Jersey Noir. A graduate of Rutgers, NYU, South Carolina, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and USC Cinema, heâÇÖs been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright (Portugal), an NEA fellowship in fiction, the T. S. Eliot Award, and the Jack Nicholson Screenwriting Award. He was also the founding editor of theáFormalist, the founding director of the St. Robert Southwell Summer Workshops, and the film critic and poetry editor atáCrisis.