Customer Reviews

Enemy of God

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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

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.

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

Gabe Driscoll, Earl Finley, Andrew Troy and Frank Redmond are the crux of an award-winning swim team at Fordham Prep in New York, bonded by their athletic victories, Catholic religion and easy friendship. These boys will grow up to be Chief of Internal Affairs, a prosecutor with an eye on public office, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a priest. But on a cold day in Harlem, Father Redmond plunges to his death in his parish, leaving Gabe Driscoll and Andy Troy to determine the cause of death, suicide or murder. Father Frank's demise awakens the past for the now middle-aged men, the sweet memories of their years together still fresh, making the death all the more painful and suspicious.

The quest for resolution takes on a life of its own, as Driscoll mines his police sources for an investigation of anyone who might have wanted Redmond out of the way, drug dealers or gang members, perhaps. Regardless of their efforts, the cop and the journalist are hard-pressed to learn anything helpful about their friend, who is a cipher, his monastic life devoid of clues. The truth of the matter is revealed in flashbacks to the earlier years of these men, from their youth to their adult lives, the more private aspects of each, the disappointments and moral dilemmas that define them.

Although this is a tough story, years of friendship shared from Catholic school through careers and marriages, there is great energy in the telling, the school years, the Vietnam experience, generational changes that affect the kind of men they become. Shifting from past to present, it is easy to identify with their history of youthful dreams and the lessons learned along the way. Daley writes as if he knows this territory intimately, and for that reason, the characters and plot are entirely believable.

Daley's story is particularly affecting, as these four men are so like their generation, although they are not as familiar with the women in their lives. This, perhaps, is the fatal flaw in the investigation: Driscoll and Troy have looked at Frank's world through their own eyes, a prism that is distorted by its very maleness. It is the women who are most intuitive, who have watched Father Redmond in all his flawed humanity, felt compassion for his struggles as a man and a priest. From the Bronx to Harlem, from Vietnam to Africa, the novel follows friendship in all its permutations; but it is those unexpected moments of loss, inexplicable events that question how well one man really knows another and just how much of this road is tread irrevocably alone. Luan Gaines/2005.

The story itself is not something I normally go for. I am not a reader of depressing crime fiction, and this was very depressing. I don't like it when the Catholic church is used as a punching bag, as it is in this book. So, in all, I did NOT like the story.

But aside from the story, I found the narration of the story very dry. The reader's voice was not very contrasting, engaging, or interesting. What parts I enjoyed (like the scene where Earl "confronts" the mafia boss in the restaurant), I enjoyed despite the narration.

The story was depressing and the reading was disengaging.

In short, I skipped about 1/2 of the book but I still know most of what happened and I don't care about what I missed. I wish I had not picked this up at the library. It's a few hours I will never get back.

(*)>

It seems as though it has been at least a decade since Robert Daley has authored a novel. Though this book has had mixed reviews on this forum I thoroughly enjoyed it. The plot moved quickly and the characters were nicely developed. The authors experience as a NYPD deputy commissioner definitely helps contribute to his authoritativeness. Briefly the story chronicles the lives of four main characters who met at Fordham Prep when they were on the swim team. They all went on to live eventful,accomplished professional lives. One as chief of internal affairs for the NYPD, another became a candidate for District Attorney,the third was a top newspaper columnist and the fourth a priest in Harlem. The priest fell off a building. Was it murder or suicide? The book goes back and forth thru investigative and flashback chapters to find the answer. Excellent and fast paced read.

When Father Frank Redmond plunges from the roof of a four-story building in the toughest part of New York City, his closest friends do not believe that his death is suicide. Gabe Driscoll, Chief of Internal Affairs for the New York Police Department, and Andrew Troy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, decide to conduct their own investigation. They, along with Earl Finley, an assistant district attorney, were on a championship swimming team with Frank Redmond when they were in high school, and though thirty years have passed, the four friends have stayed in New York and kept in touch.

Recreating the early lives of the four men, Robert Daley shows how each has developed into the adult he has become, emphasizing their early idealism, their dreams for the future, their belief in the purity of romantic love, and their commitment to the teachings of the Catholic Church. As they have matured, they have all been forced to deal with life's complex realities, and all but Father Frank have left the church. All have discovered that idealistic dreams do not often come true, that compromises must be made, and that love, marriage, and sex do not always happen in that order or lead to eternal happiness.

As the narrative switches from present to past and back again, the reader, like Driscoll and Troy, searches for clues which would explain the death of the priest, who served three tours of duty in Vietnam and then ten years as a missionary in Africa. Troy, too, was in Vietnam, writing for his newspaper, and he worked in Africa at the same time as Father Frank. Earl Finley, meanwhile, has brought down a corrupt Congressman and has recently challenged a Mafia capo. The priest, who loved Finley's wife when they were college students, has personally removed a violent gun dealer from his neighborhood, and in recent months has had several unexplained bank deposits and withdrawals. Who might have wanted the priest dead, and why, are the questions which generate the suspense here.

With the emphasis on characters, rather than plot, the mystery wanders a bit, and the reader is not always sure why so much background is provided for the four friends and whether it contains clues to Father Frank's death. The conclusion ties up the loose ends and explains the novel's ironic title, but the resolution comes about through sudden, unexpected twists of fate, rather than as a natural outgrowth of the characters' backgrounds. Still, the novel is an intriguing look at the complex life of a contemporary priest, an entertaining summer read. n Mary Whipple

Perhaps the Publisher's Weekly reviewer missed the significance of the title of Daley's book, The Enemy of God. There were complaints about its being cliche-ridden, characters who did not come to life and a lack of charting of their relationships over the years. Probably the most important part of this book was its suggestion that these characters had been stultified by their being raised in such a conservation, rigid Catholic faith that they were unable to develop later in life and kept all manner of intimacies from each other in fear. The improbably extreme, for today anyhow, priest-in-charge was more unbelievable than those of the DAs, politicians and mobsters. However, if one reads the book as a struggle with the Catholic faith, these other issues pale as symbols beside a much more powerful moral struggle for all the characters' hearts, souls and minds.

The Publisher's Weekly comment that the twist at the end of this novel is not credible is understated. (Poorly written sentence, I know; but I received no huge advance for this one.) This rather mundane work is flawed. Simply put, the reader should get his/her money back on this one.

I give it one star because i had to.

i felt cheated.

This novel, by Robert Daley, is outstanding. He characterizes not only the main character but four additional characters as well. His depth of knowledge of his subject makes this novel the type of book one wishes would not end; it's that good. I have recommended it to several friends and acquaintances.