erhaps you believe that the Knights Templar—those secretive, hard-fighting, sword-bearing crusaders for Jesus—were extirpated in the Middle Ages. Well, you couldn't be more wrong. The organization just went underground, and still exists today, functioning as a holy bulwark against all the devilish and mortal evils continually besieging God's creations. Of course, the Knights have adapted with the times. They pack heavy firepower and plenty of high-tech gadgets, rendering them more akin to James Bond than Richard the Lionhearted. And, of course, other religious orders boast their own militant wings, such as the Special Action Executive Branch of the Sisters of the Poor Clare.
Our protagonist, Peter Crossman, paradoxically both priest and professional killer, is an experienced member of the Knights. His latest assignment finds him paired with a newbie, Simon LaRoche. The two men are on the trail of some kidnapped U.N. representatives, a trail that leads to a warehouse in New Jersey containing some otherworldly fungi. Soon they are joined by Sister Maggie of the S.A.E. Cut off from HQ, the trio must battle an unknown array of forces aligned against them. Are the cross-cringing mushrooms an invasion force from hell, or just from an alternate universe? A visit to a famous satanist, Dalrymple, in search of information only confuses the matter. When Peter is kidnapped by the Knights Teutonic—a rival organization—a new thread is woven into the plot. The fact that the Teutonics are in possession of Baphomet—the famous Talking Brass Head of the Templars—adds a new wrinkle to the plot.
Escaping with Baphomet, Peter reunites with Simon and Maggie. They encounter a reanimated corpse named Joey—a former contact in the spy world—and eventually convince Baphomet to talk to them. What the Brass Head reveals is a plot extending back a millennium. And unless our trio can stop its climax this very night, the whole world is doomed.
A pulp thriller that's positively heavenly
You have to hand it to James D. Macdonald. He's got absolutely no timorous compunctions about taking several millennia of sacred devotion and worship and holy iconography and turning it all into a pulp thriller. Faster than you can say "Fighting Jesus," he strips the gaudy robes off the Roman Catholic Church and drapes them onto figures straight out of Mickey Spillaine or Marvel Comics' Punisher or The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (the latter series receiving its homage in the form of a basement tailor shop with a secret entrance in its changing booths). That's hubris and ambition worthy of Lucifer himself.
Having once crystallized this conceit, Macdonald goes at it with white-hot intensity and pacing. The action of the book occurs over barely 48 hours, and never flags. His prose style—first-person narration is de rigueur, of course, as with all classic PI novels—is stripped down in the transparent mode of Heinlein or John Barnes or Steven Gould. Naturally, we get our fair share of outrageous metaphors and snappy dialogue as well. The banter among the three warriors—none of whom quite trusts either of the others—crackles with amusing energy. The main backstory is rendered mainly implicitly, with hints of past cases. But Peter's own personal history, when his name was Michael, is laid out more explicitly in a separate track that dovetails with the real-time narrative at the climax.
You might as well forget trying to keep track of all the players and their interactions and motivations, however. As with Raymond Chandler, who famously confessed that even he couldn't unravel all the whys and wherefores of the mysteries he intuitively composed, Macdonald creates a plot that resists complete logical unknotting, although there is an ostensibly overarching explanation given at the end. Moreover, the theology here is no deeper than a preschool catechism class. And the world-altering fungal threat, a twist on Jack Finney's famous Bodysnatchers, seems a bit hollow, given how easily the invaders succumb. But all this is ultimately beside the point. The pleasures here reside in the notion of a buff Father Dowling and a sexy badass nun pumping lead into bad guys, then administering the last rites with a straight face.
