The Sacrifice (Hardcover)

Those familiar with Detroit will be pleased to recognize familiar streets, landmarks, stores, institutions. Kienzle paints an affectionate, even rather proprietary picture of his city. Women will be pleased to find his generous yet accurate assessments of his female characters. His skill at writing about women's feelings and motives has grown in his career, and his more recent books are informed by good insights. (He gives credit to his wife in the dedication of "The Sacrifice.")

This is an enjoyable book which will keep you guessing until the final pages.

I especially value the author's ability to tell stories about powerful, even holy, institutions with rich characters who suffer the flaws that all mankind have borne: Neither the "good guys" nor the "bad guys" are stereotypical. There are rich grays in the personalities of our priests, cops and work-a-day Joes and Janes here while the heights to which some of them aspire are supremely lofty, and the depths for which others yearn are dank and noisome indeed.

Father George Wheatley is an Episcopal priest who is taking advantage of the so-called "Anglican Use Provision" in the Roman Catholic Church that allows priests in the Anglican Communion to be reordained in the Roman church despite being married. Father Wheatley's motives for his switch are complex and engender opposition both from his family and from Anglican and Roman traditionalists. The result is a bomb explosion at his ordination, missing the target but killing another priest.

Despite the beguiling plot and Kienzle's sensitive and informed understanding of Anglicanism (one flaw though: he doesn't really know how Episcopal bishops are selected), "The Sacrifice" fails to deliver as a mystery. Father Koesler spends more time explaining the Anglican ethos than solving the mystery. And the plot has too many weaknesses, including a number of separate crimes masquerading as one, a multiplicity of suspects and detectives, a plethora of one-dimensional characters, and myriad plot threads that are never really resolved -- for instance, the fates of Wheatley's closeted lesbian seminarian daughter and his ambitious daughter-in-law.

The Father Koesler series may have run out of steam. Kienzle has tried various ploys to revive it in recent years, most notably the introduction of a second-string priest/detective team, the long lost Tully brothers. None have really worked. Much as I hate to say it, it might be more merciful to let Father Koesler retire in peace.