It takes a confident storyteller to name their serial killer in the dramatis personae that opens their debut. It takes a very good storyteller to get away with it and keep their audience rapt until a dramatic, violent and unexpected conclusion.
So take a bow, Juan Gomez-Jurado, journalist, debut novelist and confident storyteller.
As an apparently growing number of authors are discovering, the secretive City-state of the Vatican is fertile ground for fiction. A rich history of intrigue and conspiracy, combined with the Catholic Church's ability to touch the lives of billions, gives it a unique position in the human psyche. If the success of the Da Vinci Code is anything to go by, it would seem that a great multitude of people are quite prepared to believe the worst of it, or at least entertain the darkest thoughts, a position exacerbated by the Church's lamentable record in dealing with the scandal of paedophilia and sexual harrassment in the priesthood.
Gomez-Jurado pitches his story right into the middle of this moral morass. A Cardinal is murdered on the eve of the funeral of Pope John Paul II as his peers gather in Rome for the Conclave that will choose his successor.
FBI-trained profiler Paola Dicanti of the Roman police is put on the case where she is forced to work alongside Fabio Dante, an inspector with the Vigilanza force that polices the Vatican. Dicanti quickly learns that the Vatican has already hushed up the violent death of another Cardinal and is clearly on the trail of a serial killer.
The killer, of course, has already been named, for the reader anyway. He is Victor Karosky, a priest trained in the US, whose dark and desperate past is explored intermittently throughout the book through transcripts of his therapy/correction sessions in a Church institution in the US where he is being treated after complaints about his interfering with children.
Dicanti quickly gets to know the killer's identity also as the investigating team, which is acting in total isolation and complete secrecy to prevent the deaths from becoming public knowledge in a City packed to the gunnels with pilgrimsm, is joined by Father Anthony Fowler, another American priest and sometime intelligence officer for the US Air Force.
As Karosky's killing escalates and as the Vatican moves towards Conclave, so the hunt for the murdered becomes a desperate race against time.
There's a great deal to like about this book. The characters are well drawn, and the tension between them and the interests they represent is palpable and handled carefully. The narrative is fast and furious, and the sense of urgency in the investigation very real. There could have been a little more Vatican politicking in it for my liking, but it's not quite that sort of book, so that's not a criticism.
The author also creates a real sense of the moment in the story. Every time a character turns round they are confronted by a wall of pilgrims heading for St Peter's Square or another place of worship and the atmosphere nicely encapsulates the "end of an era" feel that there was back in spring 2005 when the last Pope passed away and the Church set out on its new (or, in actual fact, not particularly new) social and political course.
For the ex-journalist in me there's also a lovely moment where a young Spanish hack, trying to make her way in the world, is fortuitoutsly handed the scoop of a lifetime and is then faced with, first, an ethical dilemma about how to approach it, and later is confronted with a physical battle to saver her story.
This is not a perfect novel (few are) and there are moments where the story tested my ability to believe the behaviour of characters even given the latitude offered them by mystery fiction, but it is a ripping tale and a very good read, and it suggest that (the impossibly young-looking) Juan Gomez-Jurado will enjoy a long and distinguished career as a novelist.