The hero here is a bit too much: ex-military, ex-Jesuit, polyglot, painful past, brilliant at literary analysis, and good at breaking up street fights. But Myles Dunn is entertaining to read about on his return to Oxford at the request of an old friend, and he gets quickly ensnared in a complicated plot involving a secret society, a mysterious poem, a beautiful and intelligent librarian, an operative from the Vatican, several unsettling crimes, and a race against the clock. He has to contend with religious tensions, xenophobia, poliitical machinations at the university, unsympathetic police, and a long-missing valuable chalice which might or might not have ever existed.

Dark Sonnet exists somewhere on the spectrum between Dan Brown and Umberto Eco, and it's a pretty suspenseful thriller, combining historical fiction with literature and theology, drawing parallels between past anti-Semitism and current Islamophobia, and finding some redemption after brutality. I hope there's a sequel in the works--I'd like to spend more time with the characters, at least the non-murderous ones.

NOVEL: Dark Sonnet

AUTHORS: Tom McCarthy & Bill Dohar

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2022

IMAGE: book cover, De Profundis Books