God's Spy: Juan Gomez-Jurado

Inspector Paola Dicanti is one of only a few FBI trained profilers in Europe but her skills are sorely underused, and underappreciated. She's afraid that her hard-won training will languish in the Roman police office until a dead cardinal turns up in a small church following the death of Pope John Paul II. The cardinal's death is anything but natural and Paola finds herself on the trail of a serial killer but her allies will prove as questionable as the killer's true motives.

When Paola is called to the scene of the brutal murder she finds that the Vatican's corpo de vigilanza is already on the scene. Not only are they on the scene, they also reveal that this is not the first, but the second murder. Paola is furious when she learns that evidence of the first murder was destroyed to avoid a scandal. However the Vatican is its own country and plays by its own rules. To this end they saddle her with a member of the corpo de vigilanza to ensure that news of the killings doesn't leak to the public. This is especially important once it's learned that each victim was in Rome for the Conclave, and each was considered a front-runner in the election of the new pope. When an American priest with obvious former CIA ties arrives in Rome and reveals that the killer is a former priest with a long history of violence and pedophilia, Paola is drawn into some of the worst secrets that the Catholic Church has to hide. She'll be forced to butt heads with not only the Vatican forces but also her own supervisor to find the killer before he can complete his final masterwork.

The first thing I want to say is that despite what other reviews may have said, this book is not like The DaVinci Code. It's not DaVinci Code-esque. It's not similar at all. It just happens to have the Vatican and a killer. Now, as for the story itself, the plot was good though I did some issues with the pacing. The action seemed to stutter at some point and then jump ahead with oddly-phrased explanations. The same goes for the dialogue and narrative. It seems to be stilted in places and rather stiff though to the author's credit I would place this as more of an issue with the translation and the fact that I was reading an uncorrected proof than anything to do with the actual story itself. All in all, it was a good story and incredibly fast-paced. It's definitely a good piece for action fans.

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Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Dutton Adult (April 5, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0525949941
ISBN-13: 978-0525949947
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