DEUS X

August Octavio Snow, who was fired for daring to lift his head above the corruption swamping the Detroit Police Department, is confronted with his fourth and biggest case yet.

Called home from Oslo, where he’s been helping the local cops and nuzzling with his girlfriend, anthropology professor Tatina Stadtmueller, by the hospitalization of his elderly neighbor Sylvia Zychek following a heart attack, Snow breathes easier after his old buddy, Ojibwe cybersecurity expert Lucy Three Rivers, hacks into Sylvia’s bare-bones Medicare supplement provider’s database and arranges top-quality care for her. But more trouble is brewing. Father Mieczyk Grabowski has retired from his pastoral position for reasons that are disturbingly unclear. The arrival of Father Dominioni Petra, from the Vatican Office of Criminal Investigations, and the report of nearby Father Michael O’Shannon’s suicide don’t clear up the mystery, but they definitely raise the stakes. Long story short: Father Grabowski has been marked for execution by Deus X, a network of assassins dedicated to avenging the Catholic clergy’s decades of sexual abuse, one abuser at a time. There’s much, much more, since Jones is more notable for fertile invention than discipline. The real treat here, though, is the distinctively celebratory way Jones—who has a Mexican American mother and a Black father—and his old friends and allies of convenience speak truth to power. They’re read the white man’s books; they’ve listened to the white man’s music; they’ve tried the white man’s recipes; they’ve lived for years under the white man’s thumb; and they earn every drop of the energetic and self-conscious disdain indicated by Snow’s faux-apologetic remark, “I was just the worst as an altar boy.”

Series fans will be happy to learn that the cesspool of Detroit politics can’t hold a candle to the Vatican.