Description:

Amazon.com Review

This massive thriller pits a scheming prince of the Church who believes he was once Alexander the Great against the Addison brothers--Harry, a Hollywood lawyer, and Danny, a Vatican priest. It seems that Danny had the bad luck to hear another cardinal's confession outlining a heinous plot to poison China's water supply in order to win the Vatican bankers a multi-billion-dollar contract to rebuild it--and of course to take advantage of the opportunity to convert a quarter of the world's population and ensure the Church's world domination into the next century. Spanning the globe from Vatican City to Beijing, from Los Angeles to Switzerland, the action never stops. And whenever it seems to falter for more than a paragraph, someone among Folsom's picaresque cast of minor characters (a nun, a dwarf, a CIA station chief, a beautiful television journalist, and an African poet, among others) turns up just in time to give it a nudge. The narrative is not as fluid as it could be, and the plot might have been devised by a conspiracy theorist with a taste for chaos physics, but fans of Folsom's intense novel __ won't be disappointed. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

A world-famous assassin, a power-hungry villain, a beleaguered hero, a plot to take over the largest country on earth. Folsom's frantically paced follow-up to his bestselling The Day After Tomorrow throws together all the raw materials of a first-rate thriller and proves that ingredients alone do not a meal make. Four days after Cardinal Rosario Parma is assassinated in Rome, hotshot L.A. entertainment lawyer Harry Addison gets a frantic phone message from his estranged brother, Danny, a Vatican priest. Shortly thereafter, Harry hears that Danny has died in a bus explosion. When he flies to Rome to claim the body, he discovers that Danny is the prime suspect in Parma's murder?and that he's still alive. The novel then follows two parallel plots. Harry tries to find Danny and clear his name; meanwhile, the sinister Cardinal Umberto Palestrina, who thinks he's the reincarnation of Alexander the Great, plots to make China the site of a new Holy Roman Empire. It's that Alexander the Great touch that pushes an already teetering story line over the edge, where everything is explained by shorthand (the estrangement between the Addison brothers) or circular logic (Palestrina is feared and powerful because he inspires fear and wields power). There's a lot of action, mostly to hide the fact that the cardboard characters generate as little sympathy as the thousands of Chinese deaths that are Step One in Palestrina's master plan. Instead of being disturbing or controversial, Folsom's mix of religion and politics approaches comic-book parody. Agent, Aaron Priest.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.