The Enemy of God
Robert Daley
Harvest, Jul 2006, $14.00
ISBN: 0156032287

Gabe Driscoll, Andrew Troy, Frank Redmond, and Earl Finley met as fourteen year olds in the 1950s trying out for the Fordham Prep swim team in the Bronx. Over the next three decades as they each went into different professions their friendship remained strong. Gabe became a cop; Andrew a reporter; Frank a priest, and Earl an assistant district attorney. All are successful at their chosen vocation.

Earl is the first of the quartet to die having been murdered. However, now fifty-three years old, Father Frank apparently leaps to his death from approximately four floors in Harem. The coroner Dr. Levin rules suicide as the evidence points to Frank jumping. The Catholic Church refuse to bury him as a Catholic since suicide is a sin to the chagrin of Gabe and Andy. They cannot believe their activist pal filled with enthusiasm to help the downtrodden would suddenly be so despondent that he would become a jumper. Though Gabe knows better as the chief of NYPD Internal Affairs, he and Andy begin investigating what happened to their friend.

The deep look at changing group dynamics and the glimpse into church and police politics add depth to a fine investigative tale that is at its best when the surviving pair struggle to understand what happened and why. When the story line takes a dramatic spin (no giveaways) it loses some of the insightfulness as it turns more into a thriller; which in turn bleeds away what made the foursome especially Gabe and Andy full blooded characters as the two survivors morph into two dimensional superheroes. Still overall this is a solid relationship investigation that falls short of Robert Daley's YEAR OF THE DRAGON.

Harriet Klausner