About the Book
The timeless battle between savage and sacred
Myles Dunn is certain of nothing except that he can never return to Oxford. Two years ago, as a much-admired Jesuit at the threshold of prestige and possibility, he made two irredeemable mistakes: he fell in love with the perfect woman and then killed her in a motorcycle accident. Shattered, he lost his faith, left the priesthood, abandoned his career and decamped to his birthplace in Colorado, where he's been working in a hardware store, languishing in ignominious limbo. When he receives a dire and dubious plea from his late beloved's brother Jeremy-a Jesuit and Myles' estranged friend-against nearly every impulse within him he reluctantly agrees to return to the place of his greatest joy and hardest fall. Jeremy, a genial but lackluster Oxford don, has stumbled upon a tattered and unpublished manuscript by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Though the unfinished poem has been ignored for well over a century, Jeremy believes it contains a series of word puzzles indicating the location of the Cuxham Chalice, a legendary treasure dating to England's medieval past. Jeremy wants Myles' help to decode the enigmatic sonnet, locate the chalice and, above all, to keep Jeremy safe from an unknown and dangerous adversary. Upon Myles' arrival, Oxford is convulsing from the beheading of an innocent boy in an apparent act of Islamist terror and besieged by riots and violent reprisals.
Two days into his visit, as Myles faces the discomfiting realization that his friend has exaggerated the sonnet's importance and his personal peril, Jeremy disappears. Myles soon realizes that persons other than Jeremy and his good friend Eva Bashir, college librarian and a secularized Muslim, are interested in the sonnet and its riddles. Myles and Eva are equally stunned to discover a connection between the murderer terrorizing Oxford and the cryptic Hopkins sonnet-why he wrote it on his deathbed and the chilling parallels that it draws to the present-day slayings. Battling police resistance, a shadowy Vatican agent and their own personal demons, Myles and Eva must decode the cryptic verse before the killer strikes again. Their friend's life is not the only thing at stake. If they fail, the result will be upheaval and terror on a national and global scale.
A perplexing thriller that unnerves and inspires
Dark Sonnet is for any reader who likes:
Labyrinthine mysteries that hinge on religious themes
The challenge of solving embedded codes and puzzles
Smart, multi-faceted layers of history, literature and word-craft
Stories that are relevant and timely
About the Author :
Tom is the literary half of the Dark Sonnet writing duo. After graduating from Georgetown, he spent two years at the University of Oxford, earning a Master's degree English, and later received a PhD from Harvard, where he was appointed Lecturer in History and Literature and won a teaching award and a Mellon Fellowship. For five years Tom wrote a monthly column in America magazine on the interplay between intellectual and spiritual life which formed the basis of the book, From This Clay. Other books include Relationships of Sympathy: The Writer and the Reader in British Romanticism. He teaches courses on urban consciousness, nineteenth-century poetry, Dickens, Modernism, political speech, borders, wilderness and death. He and his wife divide their time between Minneapolis and Tucson. Bill Dohar is a medievalist who specializes in the history of Christianity and popular religion. He studied history and theology at the University of Notre Dame, earning master's degrees in both fields. He then went on to Toronto where he earned both a licentiate from the Pontifical Institute and a PhD from the University of Toronto in Medieval Studies. He spent two years at Oxford while researching his doctoral dissertation and there met Tom McCarthy. His two books before Dark Sonnet are The Black Death and Pastoral Leadership and, co-authored with John Shinners, Pastors and the Cure of Souls in Medieval England. Bill is a former Catholic priest who lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Religious Studies Department at Santa Clara University.
Review :
This novel by two American writers, both Oxford-educated, relates an interlocking series of murders set in the university, in an expanded and strikingly more elegant version of Oxford's Jesuit college-Campion Hall (here called Ignatius College). McCarthy and Dohar expertly put all the ingredients together to form a fast-paced, original, beautifully written and slightly grisly narrative of secret societies, undisclosed ambitions and violent conspiracies, wrapped in an elegant tissue of Oxford tradition, ceremony and university sophistication. It is an absorbing tale, and an excellent read!
--Brian Daley, S.J., Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame
Fans of Dan Brown's historical thrillers, particularly the bestselling The Da Vinci Code (2003), are likely to best appreciate McCarthy and Dohar's dive into the complex and mysterious history of "the self-proclaimed 'keepers of the Grail.'" The plot's use of the work of Hopkins, a complicated author who often invented his own words, gives readers a clever character to explore...an intriguing thriller to the end.
--Kirkus Reviews
Complex and learned, yet never less than entertaining...A captivating plot.
--Ron Hansen, bestselling author of Atticus
In McCarthy and Dohar's taut thriller, an ex-Jesuit, Myles Dunn, travels back to the venerable University of Oxford, where a deadly accident years earlier cost him his faith. A distressed friend, Father Jeremy Strand, needs help decoding a newly discovered sonnet by 19th-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, which may confirm the existence of a lost medieval chalice. Oxford is reeling from a gruesome murder that locals believe is the work of Muslim terrorists. While Dunn puzzles over the poem with university librarian Eva Bashir, another murder occurs, and Strand disappears-possibly the third victim. The duo hurries to unravel the poem's wordplay and symbols to save their friend.
When the narration zeroes in on the main characters, including several chapters from Hopkins's perspective, the plot picks up speed. The authors admirably connect the disparate dots-how does a "dark sonnet" shed light on a secret society from the 1500s and Britain's history of anti-minority rancor?
An array of well-drawn suspects keeps the mystery thrumming...Dark Sonnet is an entertaining ride in the vein of the best historical conspiracy puzzle-thrillers, and its smart characters even playfully acknowledged the assumptions of the genre, when one wonders aloud why the poet resorted to an elaborate ruse when dying and desperate to convey a secret: "Couldn't Hopkins have sent a letter to some trusted soul"? Fans of such mysteries will be glad he didn't.
This Oxford-set puzzle thriller explores secret societies and prejudices past and present.
--BookLife
