The Bishop Goes to the University: A Blackie Ryan Story FROM THE PUBLISHER
The irrepressible Bishop Blackwood Ryan returns as his Cardinal dispatches Blackie to The University on the South Side of Chicago to investigate a baffling locked-room mystery. Someone has assassinated a Russian Orthodox monk in his office at the Divinity School - despite the fact that the door of his office was bolted shut from the inside and no killer was found within.
Who shot Brother Semyon Ivanivich Popov? There were only four professors in the building on the night of the shooting: a feminist theologian, a distinguished scripture scholar, an expert on the Talmud, and a young tenure-seeking professor whom Blackie compares to a silverback gorilla.
It turns out that the mystery of the locked room is simple compared to the international intrigue that swiftly develops around the case. Intelligence agents from diverse nations seem to be involved, as well as both the Sicilian and Russian mobs. Blackie soon finds himself the target of threats and actual bullets as he seeks to unravel the deepening mystery surrounding the murdered monk - whose murky secrets may stretch all the way to the Vatican itself!
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
In The Bishop Goes to University: A Blackie Ryan Story, by the reliably entertaining Andrew M. Greeley, Bishop Ryan looks into a Russian Orthodox monk's murder at the divinity school of the University on Chicago's South Side. A locked-room mystery quickly turns into a tale of spies and international intrigue. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
More derring-do from Chicagoﾽs coolest cleric, who solves a locked-room mystery, saves an imperiled cardinal, and socks it to the Vatican in his fourth adventure. "One cardinal ought to be enough for Chicago, ought he not, Blackwood?" Patently, yes. And since the speaker is his Eminent Lordship Sean, Cardinal Cronin, Blackie (The Bishop in the West Wing, 2002, etc.) understands heﾽs been given marching orders. So off he marches to Chicagoﾽs south side and The University, where, in an office at the Divinity School, the extra cardinal is now posthumous, his head blown off by a shotgun blast. Though the setting for this sanguinary homicide is a sealed room, thatﾽs not what truly wrinkles the bishopﾽs clever brow. Far knottier questions surround the who of cardinal two. Where did he come from? Why does his crimson garb appear to have been cut for a cardinal four inches taller? What makes his secret memoir so desperately sought a MacGuffin that clandestine agencies on both sides of the Atlantic will stop at nothing to get their hands on it? Nor is the Vatican itself an innocent bystander. Decently written and plotted, and if you can forgive the little bishopﾽs occasional smugness, you may be charmed.
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