The Enemy of God

By Robert Daley
$5.95 at Amazon

Robert Daley is an old pro at writing gritty New York crime stories. He wrote the non-fiction book that was the source of the 1980s movie “Prince of the City,” and he’s written 17 novels.

The Enemy of God, recently made available as an ebook, runs on parallel tracks. It bounces between the investigation into the death of a Catholic priest who somehow went off the top of a building and the back story of four friends who became the priest, a journalist, a cop and a prosecutor.

The homicide detectives on the scene want to quickly clear the death of the Rev. Frank Redmond as a suicide. After all, he fell from a fourth-floor rooftop, and no one else was seen in the area. The medical examiners agree, as does Fr. Frank’s monsignor, who refuses to give him a Catholic burial and hints at sexual impropriety.

But Gabe Driscoll, a major mogul in the NYPD, cannot believe his high school friend has committed the unpardonable sin of suicide and enlists their aid swim-team buddy Adam Troy, now a big-time newspaper reporter, to help unearth the truth about his death.

In alternating chapters, the history of Redmond, Driscoll, Troy and the fourth member of their 200-yard freestyle relay team, Earl Finley, slowly plays out to establish the circumstances that led to Frank’s death.

Though close as boys and as teammates at Fordham University, each member of the quartet has had his own life and loves as an adult, leaving plenty of room for secrets. In a way, the wives of Finley and Driscoll knew more about the four men than they knew about one another.

Much of The Enemy of God, such as the friends’ dogged pursuit of an explanation for the death of a man they admired, is familiar. But by emphasizing the history of their personal lives – known and unknown to the self-appointed investigators – Daley gives us a densely woven book that makes the reader think “novel” more than “mystery.” His cold and gray New York envelops the narrative with a ’60s and ’70s city of walk-up apartments, stick ball and dirty subway cars rather than the Big Apple of Sinatra and the Whitney Museum.

The larger portion of the book deals with the personal stories, especially that of Frank Redmond, a man of almost saintly behavior who, nonetheless, faced demons intrinsic and incidental to his Catholic faith and clerical vows.

As might be expected, the facts that eventually emerge about Frank’s death don’t lead to the closure the friends sought. Real life is often like that.

Bill Furlow

My Two Years in the Priest Corps

By Joe Novara
$1.99 at www.smashwords.com

Former Roman Catholic priest Joe Novara has written the least angry memoir about leaving the priesthood you’re ever likely to read. If Novara is outraged by the church’s child-abuse scandal, he keeps it to himself. If he felt somehow betrayed by those who educated him in the holy mysteries for a dozen years, he doesn’t let on.

And yet Novara has written a most pleasant account of being sent to seminary in high school, remaining there through college and then going off among a select few for further theological training in Rome. Over the course of the narrative, he goes from being “totally engaged” with the church to having an “arm-length indifference” to it.

The tale doesn’t spool out in chronological sequence but is told via a collection of stories – sort of a “Then-there-was-the-time” approach, which works fine. He doesn’t say it straight out, but if I had to guess, I’d bet Novara at least occasionally wishes it had worked out differently. He wouldn’t give up his wife and child from his post-priesthood life, of course, but I think he wishes he were still in love with the church.

Married now and with a grown daughter, he takes a nostalgic tour of the churches in his former precincts. He runs into an old friend, an admirable, aging priest who still puts effort into his homilies for weekday evening liturgies for a congregation too small to justify use of the sanctuary. A nun who had been the principal of Joe’s high school still serves with the priest as “missionaries to Detroit’s East Side, urban-renewed wasteland.” She was now trying to establish and run an experimental high school.

As he leaves the church and his former mentors, Novara wonders whether he had “skipped out too soon – had left right after the bloom went off the romance of priestly work. Theirs has been a lifelong commitment. Mine was a kind of ‘living together’ arrangement – fine as long as it worked.”

Novara doesn’t ignore the priest child-abuse scandal. He writes of a seminary classmate who was great with kids. “Is my memory of Dave naïve? Would he have been the kind of priest to commit these awful crimes? All my instincts shout no. But I’ve learned I never can know for sure.” It’s one more thing that’s changed from the church he thought he once had committed himself to.

One reason Novara’s edges aren’t sharper may simply be the passage of time. He became a priest in the ‘60s, a tumultuous time in the world and an exciting time for the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. He served two years in a Detroit parish before making his exit.

After ordination and his Michigan homecoming, he began to learn the realities of being a priest, that it’s the ultimate 24/7 job, and you never get to leave the burdens at home. He also saw the relationship between priest and parishioner in a different light. “I thought I was going to be a personal trainer for a leaner, enlightened Catholicism,” he writes. “The majority of my congregation simply wanted a massage therapist.”

Despite any yearning for or curiosity about the road not taken, Novara ultimately is content with his choice to leave the church. “I so wanted to serve God and humanity on the macrocosmic, supernatural level. I came to find that atmosphere too rarefied. The scale of one on one friendship; the microcosm of my family has proved a more gratifying and seemingly successful strategy.”

Click here to link to My Two Years in the Priest Corps.