The Death of Saints

In 1912, amidst blatant political corruption and the construction of the New York subway system, the largest ever recorded movement of the human population is at its pinnacle.

The Church in Rome, deprived of all its papal states, is bankrupt. It must depend, in large measure, on American coffers for the Peter Pence required to keep the Church solvent. The richest American city is New York, where Irish Catholics have run the Democratic party machine, Tammany Hall for seventy-five years. Now, it’s an election year, and a series of grisly, ritualized murders threatens to bring the political establishment crashing down.

The Death of Saints is set against an historically accurate period of corruption, the battle for woman’s suffrage, rampant antisemitism, the building of the New York subway system, and the patriarchal collusion between Church and State, all at a time when history was becoming the modern era we know today.

A. B. Kahn, a recklessly outspoken, editorial reporter is determined to get to the bottom of a corrupt cover-up by the New York City police department, as orchestrated by New York Mayor, William Jay Gaynor; Police Commissioner Rheinlander Waldo; and notorious Tammany boss, Big Tim Sullivan.

Cate Gallagher, founder of the Family Aid Society, is facing federal sentencing for mailing birth control information across state lines. Though only a misdemeanor, the offense carries a sentence of five-years hard labor in a federal penitentiary. While giving a tour of living conditions in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Cate discovers the body of a young, immigrant woman, who has been ritually killed. The dead woman is perhaps just the latest of many.

Complicating Cate’s life is the brash Noah Goodwin, an avowed womanizer, waiting out India’s rainy season before returning to his archaeological dig in the Punjab. Out of sheer boredom, he’s taken a summer job surveying the underground excavation of Manhattan amidst the construction of the subway system and the sinking of massive skyscraper foundations.

Keeping a jaundiced eye on Abie’s effort to ferret the truth are His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Bernard, determined to be the first American Pope, and Monsignor Palladin, the Cardinal’s chancellor and eminence grise. What, these men of the Church fear, might be revealed about the Irish-Catholic stalwarts running the Democratic party machine, Tammany Hall?

Abie, Cate and Noah’s final race to stop the next slaying drags all three, along with the killer, into the very bowels of Manhattan’s underground metropolis.

What has it all to do with a bone relic stolen from a church years before, and a boy abused by a priest?

Fans of David Liss’s A Conspiracy of Paper and Mathew Pearl’s The Dante Club will find this riveting, intricately plotted tale unfurls like a serpent, set to strike at each turn of the page.