First one I have read in the series. It was not a favorite but I must admit I started reading this before I got swine flu and tried to read it several times during my sickness but didn't get far. It does do some interesting things with conspiracies but I was not particularly drawn to the main character of the series Gregor Demarkian. ( )

#19 in the Gregor Demarkian series.

Although she sticks to the format of her highly successful formula for this series, Haddam spends very little time introducing her cast of suspects. And, we are startled to encounter Father Tibor Kasparian right at the beginning—and all is not well with Tibor, Demarkian’s best friend. A year after 9/11, Tibor is uncharacteristically frightened, as he leaves his home to keep an appointment one evening.

We read nothing else about Tibor, his appointment, or the cause of his fear, other than a mysterious letter is involved, until all the major players for this story have been introduced, and the key murder committed. Then comes the blockbuster event—Holy Trinity Armenian Christian is blown sky high by a bomb, sending Tibor flying and knocking him out cold.

Thus ends the Prologue, and the story, very tightly told, proceeds from there as of curse Gregor becomes involved. BUT as a part of the investigation of the aforementioned key murder of Anthony Ross, a financier so wealthy, so high in world financial circles that only a small percentage of the financial world even knows about him. But he lived in Bryn Mawr, PA, and through his friend John Jackman, who has risen to become Philadelphia Police Commissioner, Gregor is more or less co-opted to investigate the Ross murder, such a high-profile case that the Police Department has few resources to spend on the bombing of Holy Trinity Church. That bombing takes on sinister overtones when Tibor shows Gregor the letter he has received—the latest in a series claiming that Devil worship goes on in Holy Trinity and that the Church will pay.

Through the bombing, which seems like the work of domestic terrorists, Gregor becomes more and more deeply involved in trying to penetrate and understand the world of the Conspiracy Theorists. These are the people—a small but highly organized fraction of the population—who promote the idea that the governments of the world are run by an elite group of people who are really out to subvert in particular US independence and substitute a One World government, ostensibly under the aegis of the UN but in reality run by this elite. This One World has brainwashed the majority of Americans no through propaganda only, but through invisible, undetectable gases that emanate from the ordinary TV to keep the population drugged and docile. While this is an extreme view, it is not that far off from what a very good, otherwise intelligent friend of mine believes. Haddam introduces the book with a small section entitled the Harridan Report (surely not an accidental name), which is propaganda from a fictional group she has created for this story. But in her Acknowledgements section, she insists that the Web sites she has scattered throughout the book, with excerpts from the texts on those sites, truly existed at the time of the writing of her book. I always knew that there were crazies ‘out there” like that, but I had no idea that there were so many of them.

Haddam very effectively uses the fictional group in this book as an integral part of the plot and the investigation. The denouement is truly tragic and I have no doubt realistic, with an excellent twist thrown in for the resolution of the murders (this is a Demarkian novel, after all—definitely multiples).

This may very well be Haddam’s best-written book in what is an increasingly outstanding series. Highly recommended. ( )