Then, as he had graduated magna cum laude in psychology at Princeton at the age of twenty, he had been sent by his bishop to work at the Saint Matthew Institute in Maryland that dealt with priests who "have a history of sexual abuse of minors or problems with drugs", and where he could not approve of what was going on as most of the staff seemed to lack any sort of professional expertise.

One of the worst of the sex offenders, a Father Karosky, later escaped, and Father Fowler, who had by then been working at a soup kitchen in Harlem for several years, was contacted by an old service boss to help him track him down. He proves a bold and determined investigator, being quite convinced that behind all his own frailties and the frailties of the current church, "There is another Church, infinite and invisible, whose flags are raised towards Heaven. This Church lives in the hearts of the millions of faithful who love Christ and his message. It will reborn from its ashes and fill the world."

Juan Gómez-Jurado (1977- ) was born in Madrid, graduated in communication sciences at San Pablo University, became an award-winning journalist, and has also worked in radio and television. Following the international success of God's Spy, his first novel which became a best-seller and has been published in more than forty countries, he achieved his ambition of becoming a full-time writer. He has gone on to win a number of literary awards. He lives in Madrid with his wife and daughter.


God's Spy (English translation, 2007)
God's Spy sees Father Anthony Fowler helping Paola Dicanti, a profiler who works with the Italian police (and of whom he grows rather over-fond for a priest), investigate the brutal murder of cardinals who were attending the Vatican to elect a new pope, following the death of Pope John Paul II. Each of them has had his tongue cut out, his hands removed and his eyes gouged out. It is Fowler who identifies the murderer as Father Victor Karosky, a murderous pederast whom he had first met when he was working at the St Matthew Institute, who had killed a priest, a Father Selznick, during his escape, and had "cut out Selznick's tongue and lips. He also sliced off Selznick's penis and forced him to eat it. It took Selznick three hours to die, yet nobody knew anything about it until the next morning."

The pursuit of Karosky, who adopts some very effective disguises, gets more and more hectic, and certainly doesn't lack excitement. But it is Paola's profiling skills that eventually lead her to realise that Karosky is more than just an individual serial killer. This lead to a dramatic bloody climax in which Fowler gets involved in desperate hand-to-hand fighting.

It makes a eventful story that holds the attention throughout. Indeed some of its original Spanish readers found it quite shocking. Karosky's behaviour is truly appalling, but so, it turns out, was his own childhood - and indeed the way he had been treated at the St Matthew Institute, where he had been chemically castrated. It is strong meat, and James Graham's English translation makes it vivid and compelling.

But it is perhaps more of a dramatic adventure than a real detective story, and surely the Vatican isn't really quite such a sinister place as it is made out to be, what with its Holy Alliance, and its elite, the Hand of St Michael: "A group of special agents who were posted throughout the world" and who would, if so ordered, "fabricate crucial information that would change the course of a war. They would silence,deceive, and at the furthest extreme, kill." Just a little over the top, perhaps.

Contract with God (2009)
Contract with God gets off to a gripping start with a flashback to December 2005 to a small town outside Vienna where Father Anthony Fowler, CIA operative and a member of the Vatican's secret service, The Holy Alliance, had been sent to "deal with" a wartime criminal who had been known as the Butcher of Spiegulgrund. But first he has to find a candle covered in fine filigree gold that had been stolen from a Jewish family many years before. It contains, believe it or not, the missing fragment of an ancient map showing where the actual Ark of the Covenant is hidden!

Fowler is sent to join an expedition to Jordan, set up by a wildly reclusive billionaire who is determined to find the Ark. But there is a traitor in the group who has links to terrorist organisations back in the US, and who is patiently waiting the moment to strike. It all ends in an appalling bloodbath, thanks to the use of the Ypsilon protocol. This is "a procedure by which a security detail assassinates all the members of the group they're supposed to protect, if the code word comes over the radio. They kill everybody except the person who hired them and anyone who says he should be left alone."

However, the first part of the story is a real page-turner, and it is all exciting enough to hold the reader's interest throughout, even though the plot gets more and more unlikely as it develops. Andrea Otero, the Spanish journalist, whose life Fowler had saved in the previous book, reappears and turns out to be a lesbian, who falls in love with the expedition's woman doctor, an Israeli spy. But at least she is a credible character, which is more than can be said for Mr Kayn the reclusive millionaire, or Colonel Dekker, his taciturn head of security, or the mysterious villain Huqan.

Although the story jumps around from one set of characters to another, it is all told with considerable skill so is seldom confusing. However, there is an emphasis on bloodthirsty violence, including detailed descriptions of torture, shootings, hand-to-hand fighting, and even a fearsome attack by killer ants, deliberately provoked so as to attack the victim. The author spares us no details, so, when Andrea Otero has to defend her life by shooting an attacker, we are told that, "He fell, face up, trying to talk, blood gurgling from his mouth. Horrified, Andrea saw that the shot had ripped out some of the German's teeth. She stepped aside and waited, still aiming the pistol at him - although if she hadn't managed to wound him through sheer luck, this would have been pointless as her hand was shaking too much and her fingers had no strength left in them. Her arm ached from the pistol's kick. It took the German almost a minute to die. The bullet had gone through his neck, destroying his spinal cord and leaving him paralysed. He choked on his own blood as it flooded his throat."

It all leads up to a truly melodramatic climax, in which almost everyone gets killed or blown up, and in which Fowler himself once again gets involved in desperate hand-to-hand fighting. No wonder that, at the end, he sees advantages in being thought of as dead: "He grew increasingly conscious of the fact that his 'death' could finally provide the liberation he had been seeking all these years. He would no longer have to be a soldier of God." Then he read out to himself the symbols on the flat stone which he had used to knock out the arch villain: "Loh Tirtzach. Thou shalt not kill. in that instant, he asked for forgiveness. And was forgiven." Well, it's not every clerical detective who ends up clutching part of the original Ten Commandments - or who gets forgiven quite so glibly.

The author has his own multi-lingual website, although much of it does not work or turns out to be in Spanish. For more information, see the Wikipedia site. There is a very critical review of God's Spy on The Complete Review site, and a highly enthusiastic one on the Italian Mysteries site.

His books are available, new or used.

Search Now:

If you are in the UK, use:

Search Now: