The Fifth Gospel: A Novel
SynopsisPlot
In 2004, as Pope John Paul II’s reign enters its twilight, a mysterious exhibit is under construction at the Vatican Museums. A week before it is scheduled to open, its curator is murdered at a clandestine meeting on the outskirts of Rome. That same night, a violent break-in rocks the home of the curator’s research partner, Father Alex Andreou, a Greek Catholic priest who lives inside the Vatican with his five-year-old son. When the papal police fail to identify a suspect in either crime, Father Alex, desperate to keep his family safe, undertakes his own investigation. To find the killer he must reconstruct the dead curator’s secret: what the four Christian gospels—and a little-known, true-to-life fifth gospel known as the Diatessaron—reveal about the Church’s most controversial holy relic. But just as he begins to understand the truth about his friend’s death and its consequences for the future of the world’s two largest Christian Churches, Father Alex finds himself hunted down by someone with a vested stake in the exhibit—someone he must outwit to survive.
Story
About this book
In 2004, during the final months of Pope John Paul II's papacy, a curator working on a new exhibit at the Vatican Museums is found murdered after a secret meeting on the outskirts of Rome. The same night, someone breaks into the home of Father Alex Andreou, a Greek Catholic priest who lives inside Vatican City with his young son and who had been the curator's research partner. When the papal police make little progress on either crime, Alex begins investigating on his own, driven by fear for his family's safety and loyalty to his dead colleague.
The investigation pulls Alex into the curator's unfinished research, which centered on the Diatessaron, a second-century text that wove the four canonical gospels into a single continuous narrative. What the Diatessaron might reveal about one of Christianity's most debated holy relics becomes the key question of the novel. Alex must navigate the internal politics of the Vatican, the tensions between the Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic traditions, and the interests of people who have strong reasons to control what the exhibit will say. Ian Caldwell sets the story almost entirely within Vatican City, using its small geography, layered institutions, and overlapping jurisdictions as both backdrop and pressure chamber.
