The Whispering of Bones

September 23, 2013
Rock delivers another polished performance in her fourth Charles de Luc mystery set in late-17th-century Paris (after 2012’s A Plague of Lies). When priest-in-training Charles and his confessor, Père Dainville, leave their Jesuit community to pray in a nearby church, the discovery of a murdered man hidden in the church’s crypt causes the elderly Dainville to suffer a fatal stroke. The victim is identified as a young man who had planned to enter the Jesuit novitiate; soon, Charles himself is attacked, another member of the order disappears, and scurrilous propaganda about the Jesuits begins to circulate. Charles’s desire to protect his community meets opposition from superiors uncomfortable with the unseemly visibility of his previous murder investigations, while his inner life is thrown into turmoil by painful reminders of his past as a soldier. Scrupulous historical research, psychological nuance, and colorful period depictions enrich this solidly plotted tale. Agent: Damaris Rowland, Damaris Rowland Agency.

November 1, 2013
A former soldier-turned-Jesuit scholar solves a series of mysteries during the reign of Louis XIV. When Maitre Charles du Luc and his confessor, Pere Auguste Dainville, make a pilgrimage in late 1687 to the crypt of a Carmelite church in Paris, the shock of finding a young man's body in the well chamber gives the aged Dainville a fatal stroke. Charles, a proud scion of the minor nobility, wants justice for Dainville, his mentor on the difficult road to priesthood. Then, Charles' resentful cousin, who fought with him in the Battle of Cassel, intrudes on his theological studies and reveals that another veteran of Cassel, Amaury de Corbet, has also embraced the Society of Jesus. Charles suspects that his former comrade in arms is trying to assuage his guilt rather than following a true vocation. While dealing with issues of religious life, Charles also helps the chief of police find the murderer of the young man in the crypt. A contraband book, a political conspiracy, a woman with a questionable connection to Amaury, the disappearance of two of Charles' fellow scholars and a goatherd/seer lead to a giddy denouement strangely at odds with an otherwise leisurely, sometimes-pedantic tale. Rock (A Plague of Lies, 2012, etc.) has painstakingly recreated 17th-century Paris, although with a decidedly modern emphasis on guilt as a prime motivator. A strong, sympathetic protagonist, however, atones for both the author's lapses and his own in this latest case file of an aspiring priest.

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