It is April 2005. Pope John Paul II's funeral has brought crowds of mourners swelling into tiny Vatican City. Over 100 Cardinals have gathered for the conclave to elect the next pope. Global dignitaries and heads of state arrive to pay their respects. Hoards of foreign media circle the city. A security nightmare at the best of times, this is the reality against which this timely thriller is set. As the suffocating masses increase, a cardinal is found brutally murdered. The crime scene is horrendous, the body horribly disfigured, and nothing must be revealed to the press and the public. The good name of the Catholic Church must be preserved at all costs.

Weaving relentlessly back and forth from the 1990s to April 2005, we follow American priest Victork Karosky through his inept rehabilitation at a center for the rehabilitation of Catholic Priests with a history of sexual abuse, to his macabre murders in the Vatican. At this St. Matthew's Institute in Maryland, Karosky was improperly dealt with, resulting in his slide into schizophrenia. Ghosts of his abusive childhood stalk the killer as surely as he stalks his victims. He is cold, highly intelligent, educated, sexually repressed and has a history of violence and murder. He has the "vacant, emotionless eyes of a white shark," and he escapes from St. Matthew's in 2000. (St. Matthew's really exists!)

Father Anthony Fowler, handsome American priest, is a former US Air Force intelligence officer, who worked for the CIA during the Cold War—hence his nickname, 'God's Spy'. He is subsequently sent to the St. Matthew's Institute as director of 'New Initiatives' in the '90s, in hopes of improving treatments. As a trained criminal psychologist, he had to deal with Victor Karosky. His knowledge is essential to the Vatican murders, for he surmises that Karosky is responsible. Eager to help, he arrives in Rome.

Helping Fowler in the hunt is Dr. Paola Dicanti, the tough, no-nonsense head inspector of the Laboratory for Behavioral Analysis in Rome, a special branch of the Department for the Analysis of Violent Crime. She is a profiler par excellence and is in charge of the case.

Butting heads with our two frustrated protagonists is Camil Cirin, the powerful inspector general of the police force in Vatican City—a cold, disdainful man, who willfully destroys evidence to protect his city. Cirin's loyal, right-hand man, Fabio Dante, is assigned to Dicanti as her liaison and guide in the Vatican. He is "an insufferable asshole."

Gómez-Jurado's tightly-woven plot and his details of Vatican City are excellent. At times, there are uneven spots in the translation, especially the dialog, that do distract the reader. (Was James Graham really paying attention?) This is, however, a first-rate, chilling thriller from a very gifted Spaniard.