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LAST THINGS
by Ralph McInerny
St. Martin's Minotaur, July 2003
307 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 031230899X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Father Roger Dowling really doesn't want to get involved in the Bernardo family soap opera but when Eleanor Wygant comes to the venerable priest, asking his help in persuading her niece Jessica to scrap plans for a tell-all novel which really would be a thinly disguised family history, he reluctantly agrees to at least look into the matter.

It's obvious the family presents a rich mother lode for a budding novelist. Start with a rich and philandering patriarch, Fulvio; the oldest son, Raymond, a lapsed priest who suddenly lost his faith 10 years earlier and took off with a nun to set up shop in California; and another son, Andrew, firmly entrenched as a tenured professor at St. Edmund College only because of his family name who is breaking the college's rules by "living in sin" with a female professor from the school. And, for good measure, it soon becomes obvious Eleanor Wygant has her own reasons for keeping the family secrets, well, secretŠ.thanks for a torrid affair she once had with Fulvio.

Unfortunately Fulvio is in the hospital, dying, and Eleanor has good reason to fear that love letters she had foolishly written will surface and become public knowledge. With Raymond struggling with slowly surfacing misgivings about his 10-year-old defection from the priesthood, Andrew faces his own problems outside the family. Brilliant but obnoxious Horst Cassirer, denied tenure by a committee which includes Andrew, has taken it upon himself to make life miserable for the entire Bernardo clan, especially Andrew.

Hated by virtually all his students and the vast majority of the college faculty, obviously Cassirer is doomed to die a violent death, and he does; in this instance right outside Andrew's apartment, making the professor the police's chief suspect.

Sorting out all the clues, with a host of candidates who might have committed the deed, naturally falls to Father Dowling, who is convinced of Andrew's innocence. Of course this is nothing new. The Chicago-area cleric has performed this task in 21 previous mysteries.

LAST THINGS is another pleasant, light read, for Father Dowling fans.

Reviewed by Gary Svoboda, July 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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