The Day of the Lie

January 9, 2017
Journalist John Fielding asks his friend Fr. Anselm Duffy, an English monk and former lawyer, to help a former Polish freedom fighter, in Brodrick’s labyrinthine fourth Father Anselm thriller (after 2008’s A Whispered Name). Róza Mojewska was John’s source for a story on the resistance in 1982, but they were betrayed to the secret police, costing John his press credentials and landing Róza in prison. Róza wants to find the informant—and finally expose the operative who killed her husband in 1951 and forced her to keep a devastating secret. With his prior’s permission, Anselm heads to Warsaw to uncover the truth behind the decades-old betrayal. The ensuing story is dense, complex, full of misdirection, and populated by characters who are either eager to forget or driven by remorse for what they did to survive. The history is fascinating, but the plot is hard to follow and the characters are difficult to keep straight. The book is less a thriller than a philosophical treatise on the search for balance between justice and mercy.

March 1, 2017
The thriller label on this book's cover does it a disservice. While it certainly has a thriller's trappings resistance, imprisonment, and a slew of Cold War double-dealingthe fourth Father Anselm investigation (published in the UK in 2012) proceeds at a stately pace. Call it forensic espionage, perhaps, though, as always, Brodrick's real interest is in the twists and turns that take place in men's and women's souls. Anselm, a former lawyer and current Gilbertine monk, is thrust out of his comfort zone at Larkwood Priory when a friend asks him to right an old wrong in Poland by helping Roza Mojeska, a woman imprisoned and tortured during the Stalinist Terror, and whose lips were sealed by a unique form of blackmail. Anselm works with the Institute of National Remembrance to bring Roza's torturer to justice, finding justice as difficult to identify as it is to deliver. Brodrick, himself a monk turned lawyer, layers this exquisitely plotted tale with startling reversals and carefully observed moral questions; it may not be what most genre fans would call thrillingbut it is exalting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)