Unholy Order (Paul Devlin Series #7)

Publishers Weekly

HThere's a lot to like about Edgar Award winner Heffernan's (The Dinosaur Club; Red Angel) f1fth thriller featuring Paul Devlin and his elite NYPD homicide squad. First, like Polly, Heffernan knows how to put the kettle on and keep it boiling right till the end. No mean feat. Second, his characters, however dire the circumstances, never lose their sense of humor. Even his villains, a motley and murderous crew, usually find something with which to amuse themselves as they go about their grisly work. Third, the author's people never do anything stupid. Devlin's case is the proverbial time bomb: a nun, just returned from Colombia, is found dead, her body mutilated. Apparently, she was forced to swallow condoms filled with heroin and then murdered for their retrieval. She was a member of a special, and most powerful, order in the Catholic Church, the Opus Christi, which is reluctant to cooperate with the investigation. If this weren't enough to complicate Devlin's job, Catholic priests known to have AIDS are being murdered alphabetically. How does the killer know who they were and where to find them? Devlin knows he has very little time before the press blows up the story, while the archdiocese comes down on the mayor to cover up the uglier details. Heffernan builds enough tension to have his readers squirming in their chairs. His cops are smart, his villains deliciously evil. This is the stuff we read thrillers for. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (Jan. 29) Forecast: With The Dinosaur Club currently under development by Warner Brothers, a teaser chapter in the mass market edition of Red Angel (Dec.), a regional (New England) author tour, plus possible controversy from the depiction of the Catholic Church, Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

HThere's a lot to like about Edgar Award winner Heffernan's (The Dinosaur Club; Red Angel) f1fth thriller featuring Paul Devlin and his elite NYPD homicide squad. First, like Polly, Heffernan knows how to put the kettle on and keep it boiling right till the end. No mean feat. Second, his characters, however dire the circumstances, never lose their sense of humor. Even his villains, a motley and murderous crew, usually find something with which to amuse themselves as they go about their grisly work. Third, the author's people never do anything stupid. Devlin's case is the proverbial time bomb: a nun, just returned from Colombia, is found dead, her body mutilated. Apparently, she was forced to swallow condoms filled with heroin and then murdered for their retrieval. She was a member of a special, and most powerful, order in the Catholic Church, the Opus Christi, which is reluctant to cooperate with the investigation. If this weren't enough to complicate Devlin's job, Catholic priests known to have AIDS are being murdered alphabetically. How does the killer know who they were and where to find them? Devlin knows he has very little time before the press blows up the story, while the archdiocese comes down on the mayor to cover up the uglier details. Heffernan builds enough tension to have his readers squirming in their chairs. His cops are smart, his villains deliciously evil. This is the stuff we read thrillers for. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (Jan. 29) Forecast: With The Dinosaur Club currently under development by Warner Brothers, a teaser chapter in the mass market edition of Red Angel (Dec.), a regional (New England) author tour, plus possible controversy from the depiction of the Catholic Church, Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The horribly mutilated corpse of a young woman is discovered stuffed into the trunk of a car at Kennedy Airport. And it gets worse: Her body is stuffed in turn with condoms full of heroin she's swallowed in order to smuggle them into the country. Garbed as a nun, she's originally assumed to be in disguise. It's when Mayor Howie Silver gets word that the young woman actually was a nun that the call goes out for NYPD Inspector Paul Devlin and his special investigations (read: politically explosive) super team to find the killer fast and with minimum inconvenience to the Archdiocese of New York, known to savvy senior police officials as "the Powerhouse." Compounding the problem exponentially, Sister Manuela had been a postulant in the Holy Order of Opus Christi, a controversial Church sect equally famous for near-fanatical religious observance and ecclesiastical influence. Almost at once, Devlin finds himself at loggerheads with a bevy of clerical heavy-hitters who stonewall him at every turn. In the meantime, someone starts killing the city's homosexual priests in alphabetical order. Are these murders somehow part of the same case? Pontifical pressure mounts on Mayor Silver, and the ace detective comes within an inch of being replaced. He's saved only when the embattled mayor finally decides to back the Devlin he knows, paving the way for ratiocination to triumph over zealotry.