If you were a fan of Luis Miguel Rocha’s best-seller The Last Pope, here’s the good news and the bad news about his latest thriller, The Holy Bullet:
THE GOOD NEWS It’s a fast-paced amusement park ride for the mind — fast-paced with an intricate plot. It’s another great book from the Portugal-born Rocha.
THE BAD NEWS: It’s a book you won’t want to put down. You’ll likely stay up later than you want once you start it.
Some of the reviews for this book didn’t like the prose, which some called ponderous, or the inside jokes (naming a British agent Simon Templar), and some have complained about the subplots. But those are factors that other readers will find delightful — and several factors make the book so fascinating and pleasurable.
The plot. Rocha provides a rich tapestry of foreign settings (Washington, London, Paris, Rome) as the plot shifts in time and location. The premise: it tugs at the little string of doubt that hangs from the minds of many over the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. Do we know the whole story about that? There are still doubts in the minds of many about the JFK and RFK assassinations. And the doubts boil down to this: can we trust the versions of events given to us by official government bodies or news media that relies at least partially on official information to construct its stories?
But that alone wouldn’t be enough to sustain the book so Rocha has added another element: painstaking research on the Vatican and the Catholic Church. There are layers upon layers within layers of details, creating the story’s context and painting word pictures of the workings of the Vatican and its presence. The upper level of the Catholic hierarchy is in itself a major character in the book.
On a TMV scale of one to 10 stars The Holy Bullet gets 9 stars.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.