Day of Confession FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
Allan Folsom took readers by storm with his novel The Day After Tomorrow, a harrowing tale of Nazis and mysteries that was a blockbuster a few years back. Now he's followed it up with a more mature work (but nonetheless, still a blockbuster) with epic conflict and narrow escapes. This time out, the Vatican — with its secrets, wealth, and spirituality — is in the eye of Folsom's literary hurricane. Folsom twists and turns a plot until the mysteries and thrills begin exploding around the reader, and the pages turn as if by some unseen wind. His chapters are short enough to capture even the shortest attention span, and his characters loom larger than life as they are hurled through this intriguing story.
It's the 75th birthday celebration of Pope Leo XIV, and the media and masses are out in droves to watch the Pope and his cardinals troop through the basilica of St. John. But an assassin is watching, and when the parade of religious leaders gets close enough, he shoots at the Pope's right-hand man, killing him. Then we are whisked from Italy to the home of Harry Addison in Los Angeles. Harry is a megasuccessful entertainment lawyer, known for his peaceable solutions to issues in a town of sharks. His brother Danny leaves a cryptic request for help on his answering machine. But Harry is across town, at the premiere of the new hit movie that one of his young clients wrote and directed. Danny and Harry haven't spoken for years, but they share an intense bond from childhood. When Harry gets the phone message, he erases it, not understanding its importance. But when hehearsthat his brother has been killed in the terrorist bombing of a bus, he flies to Italy to collect Danny's remains.
Arriving in Rome, Harry runs into a terror more threatening than a bomb — Danny is suspected of having been the man who murdered the cardinal, and Harry, who is suspected of being his accomplice, is picked up for questioning.
Harry finds himself in a labyrinth of half-spoken truths, where he can't quite find out what is going on around him as the Italian police play good cop-bad cop with him. Danny became a priest in his 30s, but when he was younger he got into some trouble and entered the Marines before finding religion. He was a good marksman, and the police suspect that Harry supplied him with the money necessary to buy the expensive weapons found at his home. But when Harry goes to view the body at the morgue, surprise! His brother had a prominent physical abnormality, which the corpse doesn't; it can't be Danny, even though a church official claims it is. Now, convinced that his brother is not dead, Harry suspects that some huge conspiracy surrounds the circumstances of both the assassination and the bus bombing. And just when he thinks things can't get worse, Harry is once again grabbed for questioning — leading to a chain of events that leaves a policeman dead, with Harry's prints on the gun that did the deed.
In true Harrison Ford style, Harry becomes a fugitive. His run from the law, however, lands him in the hands of kidnapper Thomas Kind. Anything but kind, Thomas has plans for Harry. After a grueling interrogation at the hands of Kind's mysterious crew, Harry is shot in the head and left for dead. This, folks, is where the story only begins to blast off.
All right, so the book seems overripe at times with improbabilities. It is both a thriller and a romp — and definitely good old-fashioned entertainment, as Vatican conspiracies mount, as both good and evil choose sides, and as a dark plan to force China to submit to the Vatican emerges. But as with The Day After Tomorrow, Folsom manages to narrow these improbabilities and bring them to startling life. This is a hit from the get-go and rollicking, page-turning fun.
—Douglas Clegg
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In Italy, the cardinal vicar of Rome is assassinated during a celebration of the pope's birthday. In Los Angeles, highly successful entertainment lawyer Harry Addison finds a desperate message on his telephone answering machine from his long-estranged brother, Daniel, a priest in the Vatican. Hours later a tour bus on which Father Daniel is traveling explodes on the road to Assisi. Arriving in Rome to investigate Danny's death and claim his body, Harry is plunged into a nightmare of deception and terror.
FROM THE CRITICS
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.
Library Journal
A dead priest accused of murder himself is the key to a secret Vatican scheme to build a new Holy Roman Empire in China. From the author of The Day After Tomorrow.
Library Journal
A dead priest accused of murder himself is the key to a secret Vatican scheme to build a new Holy Roman Empire in China. From the author of The Day After Tomorrow.
Kirkus Reviews
A pair of plucky Americans saves the Vatican from itself in a thriller long on pages and short on probability. Harry Addison, a successful young Hollywood entertainment lawyer, finds a message on his answering machine that unsettles his well-ordered world. It's from his brother, Vatican priest Father Daniel Addison—the brother Harry hasn't spoken to in eight years or seen in ten. And yet the message is a plea for help: 'I'm scared,' Daniel says, without specifying why. A day later, before Harry can respond, Daniel is killed in a bus explosion. The circumstances are mysterious, and when Harry goes to Rome to claim the body, he's further shaken by what he learns: (1) that Daniel was the leading suspect in the assassination of a Vatican cardinal, one of the Pontiff's inner circle, and (2) that he himself is being fingered as an accomplice.
It's at this point that Folsom's imagination overheats and things go haywire in the Grand Guignol manner.
As a sampling of shocks and horrors, try these: a Vatican cardinal who's a megalomaniac and another who's a murderer; a nun whose concupiscent fantasizing foreshadows the rescinding of her vows; a Vatican-inspired conspiracy aimed at bringing China to its knees as a first step toward restoring the Holy Roman Empire. Or how about the top Vatican cop hiring the world's most deadly terrorist? Object: the systematic elimination of anyone who endangers the conspiracy or even gets a sniff of its existence. And, finally, there's the high-tech firefight in Vatican City during which dead bodies pile up faster than papal bulls used to and our heroic Hollywood entertainment lawyer outperforms Rambo. Second-novelist Folsom(The Day After Tomorrow), who seems to have a penchant for overstuffing novels, buries an interesting, at times poignant, fraternal relationship beneath a paper avalanche. In suspense fiction, less can be more.
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