THE CONCORDAT

In Heary’s debut thriller, the Catholic Church goes to great lengths to protect its reputation while the Kremlin is determined to destroy it.

When history teacher Maximilian Wolf in Bonn, Germany, discovers a written agreement, or concordat, between the Vatican and Adolf Hitler among his late father’s possessions, the Vatican’s senior clerics quickly dismiss it as a forgery. Dated June 1, 1939, it almost exactly follows the style and format of another, genuine document, the Reichskonkordat of 1933, which is enough to raise suspicions of foul play. Crucially, the new concordat, which purports to have been signed only three months prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland, hints at an anti-Russian pact between the Nazis and the Holy See, which would have shocking political ramifications. Its inauthenticity is likely, but the potential for it to be used as a propaganda tool worries the Vatican enough that they’re willing to pay Wolf for it. The head of the Vatican’s police force, Inspector Gen. Enzo Rossi, is assigned the task of recovering the document; when he arrives for a meeting with Wolf, he instead finds two dead bodies—and no concordat. Assuming, rightly, that the document has fallen into Russian hands, and that the Russians intend to use it as political leverage against the church, Rossi sets off, with the aid of CIA agent Cathy Doherty, on a time-sensitive mission to track down the thief. Overall, this novel is an impressive addition to a well-stocked thriller market. Fast-paced, intelligent conspiracy tales are hardly thin on the ground, nor are novels about Vatican-related scandal, so it takes something special to stand out from the crowd, which Heary provides here. His strengths lie in his ability to fuse dramatic tension, political intrigue, and even wry humor into a narrative that manages to be simultaneously informative and escapist. His attention to detail is particularly noteworthy; the years that he spent living in Moscow enable him to write with an authority that eludes many other thriller authors mining similar material.

Highly recommended for fans of thrillers in the vein of Dan Brown’s and Robert Harris’ works.