3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The richness and ultimate tragedy of ordinary lives., July 5, 2005
This is in an odd way a police procedural, but among the richest such i have ever read. A priest is dead. Frank Redmond, a Catholic priest, fell into the street from a New York rooftop. Was it murder or, as the detectives at the scene believe, a suicide?
Deputy Chief Gabe Driscoll wants to know and pushes the precinct to investigate. Driscoll is perilously close to stepping on the toes of other police officers. He is the head of Internal Affairs and has no right to be involving himself in the investigation of a declared suicide which might be a murder.
But it doesn't matter to Driscoll: Father Redmond, you see, was a friend of his since high school. He enlists the help of Andrew Troy, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and also a friend since high school of Driscoll and the late Father Redmond, to investigate the death.
Thus begins the unraveling of seven lives. It is an absorbing and sad tale beginning with these four young men and their achievements as a swim team and the quarter-century after. I have rarely read anything so sad. These men are all ordinary, though each of them was brave in their own ways. Driscdll has risen through the New York Police Department to two-star rank as an honest cop who solved homicides. Troy is a globe-hopping journalist who has won a sterling reputation for the honesty of his writing. Earl Finley, another member of the quartet, strives diligently as a prosecutor to seek truth in the criminal courts of a city overrun by crime. And Frank Redmond becomes a priest who serves with the military in VietNam, spends years in Africa tending to the poorest of the poor and comes home to serve the poor again in Harlem.
Redmond is dead: a priest dead perhaps by his own hand - or possibly by the hand of one of the bad people he has kept from preying on his flock.
Driscoll and Troy search for the truth. Intrinsic to the story is the Roman Catholic Church and a woman, the teenage love of the late Father Redmond.
There are no Wagnerian heroics in this novel, but heroic acts abound just in the daily lives of the main characters. Daley has created characters unique and powerful in their ordinariness. We all know people like those Daley writes abou, for they are to one degeee or another ourselves.
This is not a happy book. The calvary do not come riding over the hill in the nick of time. Rather the investigation of Driscoll and Troy exposes a love story and in that love story is tragedy.
I highly recommend "The Enemy Of God." But save it for a day you feel able to cope with the sadness of life.
Jerry
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Just Okay, July 30, 2006
This review is from: The Enemy of God (Paperback)
Father Frank Redmond is a N.Y. City Priest who shared a moment of glory in the 1950's with four other boys at a Jesuit High School. As adults, the other boys turned out to be a policeman, an assistant D.A. and a newspaper reporter. When Father Redmond falls to his death off a N.Y. rooftop, his surviving friends try to determine if it was suicide or murder, given Father Redmond's controversial priesthood. We see the story pieced together by way of chapter-long flashbacks. While intriguing, the ending of the book left me feeling like I had been cheated.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
solid relationship investigation thriller, July 12, 2006
This review is from: The Enemy of God (Paperback)
Gabe Driscoll, Andrew Troy, Frank Redmond, and Earl Finley met as fourteen year olds in the 1950s trying out for the Fordham Prep swim team in the Bronx. Over the next three decades as they each went into different professions their friendship remained strong. Gabe became a cop; Andrew a reporter; Frank a priest, and Earl an assistant district attorney. All are successful at their chosen vocation.
Earl is the first of the quartet to die having been murdered. However, now fifty-three years old, Father Frank apparently leaps to his death from approximately four floors in Harem. The coroner Dr. Levin rules suicide as the evidence points to Frank jumping. The Catholic Church refuse to bury him as a Catholic since suicide is a sin to the chagrin of Gabe and Andy. They cannot believe their activist pal filled with enthusiasm to help the downtrodden would suddenly be so despondent that he would become a jumper. Though Gabe knows better as the chief of NYPD Internal Affairs, he and Andy begin investigating what happened to their friend.
The deep look at changing group dynamics and the glimpse into church and police politics add depth to a fine investigative tale that is at its best when the surviving pair struggle to understand what happened and why. When the story line takes a dramatic spin (no giveaways) it loses some of the insightfulness as it turns more into a thriller; which in turn bleeds away what made the foursome especially Gabe and Andy full blooded characters as the two survivors morph into two dimensional superheroes. Still overall this is a solid relationship investigation that falls short of Robert Daley's YEAR OF THE DRAGON.
Harriet Klausner
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