Judas Priest

Father Dowling #14

by McInerny

Agreeing to speak with the only child of a hedonistic priest, who wants to become a nun despite her father's opinions of the church, Father Dowling is stunned when she is brutally murdered, and uncovers a killer with a calling of his own. Reprint.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Judas PRIEST
by
RALPH McInnery

This was the second Father Dowling Mystery I have read, I didn't know what to expect. It turned out to be one of those stories that if you tell a little you tell to much. Idoes have a surprise ending.

[Monica Willyard Moen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this mystery featuring father Dowling and the gang. I couldn’t help but think about Phil Donahue and his dreadful morning TV show as I read about the TV show in this book. I also realized that the latter part of the plot of this book could not take place today with the use of cell phones and iPads. It was fun to be reminded of what life was like for most of us back then.

[Marti Martinson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not "I'm finished" but more "I'm through". A police chief who doesn't like women cops and is wary of Blacks. A priest reading Aquinas' Summa and not Bacon's Opus Majus.

I don't friggin need this. I don't care enough to even find out the culprit. No more Fluke, no more McInerny.

[Nancy Giles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great rainy afternoon read.

[Hugh Centerville · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Catholic priest and a nun leave the church sometime in the 1980s. They get married and unlike many lapsed priests and nuns, who still retain a certain devotion to or fondness for the institution they’ve abandoned, usually reluctantly, these two go to war against the church. They become stars of a carnal TV show, boasting about the glories of sex, the sex they’re having every night and threatening to have one day in front of the cameras.

Their daughter, who they say they wished they’d aborted, follows her parents, into rebellion if not into hedonism. Sonya is going to enter a convent but before she goes, she gets murdered.

Enter Father Dowling, to figure out whodunnit and why.

It’s too bad about Sonya. What little we see of her, she has at least the potential of becoming this book’s single most sympathetic character. (Excluding the good father, of course.) Sonya is a cute college kid, mixed up and confused, more confused than angry, she seems incapable of anger, even toward her vulgar parents. She’s a sweet young thing who deserves a hug way more than she deserves what she gets and why would anyone kill her?

Enter too a list of mostly uninteresting, one-dimensional characters. There’s the hardboiled cop and his subordinate, the latter acknowledged to be the best detective on the force, entirely professional and thorough, and what do you know, she’s a woman, and black too. There’s the sleazy ambulance-chaser (even if we don’t see him chasing ambulances, we know he would, if there was something in it for him) and the distinguished silver-haired attorney, and some blue-haired gals to move the plot along and to provide some comic relief.

I had a hard time keeping the characters straight and was the difficulty my fault or the author’s? His, I think.

At least there’s Father Dowling. He’s always entertaining, he’s just not around enough this time to save the story, and when he is around, he mostly just smokes his pipe, says the noon mass and banters with his housekeeper, Marie. Maybe the story just wasn’t intriguing enough to keep Father engaged, although he does make himself felt at the end. Of course he does.

What somewhat redeems, pardon the pun, the book for me is the author’s thoughtfulness. Bland the characters may be but they’re at least set in an engrossing milieu, described in a way that doesn’t interrupt the flow of the story, such as it is.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first foray into the Father Dowling mysteries. Not bad. Kinda reminds me in some ways of the Mary Higgins Clark stuff. I sometimes watched the television show based on these books, so I tried to picture those individuals while reading. I learned some interesting tidbits about the Catholic religion as well. Wouldn't mind reading another of his books.

[Cws]

M McI

[Dena Grover · Rating 2 out of 5]

old style parochial mystery, in the vein of Murder she wrote

[Donna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh.

A contemporary setting gets old pretty fast these days.

[Diane Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the mystery and seeing how McInerny handles moral evil. Evil has consequences for the perpetrator. It burns a person.