The Bishop's Man

Plot

“The night before things started to become unstuck, I actually spent a good hour taking stock of my general situation and concluded that, all things considered, I was in pretty good shape. In that evanescent moment of tranquillity, I was feeling okay. I see it as another life, the man I was, a stranger now.” Father Duncan MacAskill knows all about temptation, all the devious ways that lonely priests persuade themselves that their private needs trump their vows. His fellow men of the cloth call him the “Exorcist” behind his back because he’s spent most of hie priesthood as the bishop’s clean-up man, the enforcer sent in to discipline th wayward priests and tidy away potential scandal. Tidy away the emotions of the victims too, which is something that has been increasingly wearing away at his sense of justice and calling. And so, when the bishop catches wind that a big media scandal may be heading their way and suggests that now might be the time for Duncan to relocate to duties in a country parish far out of the line of fire, he is only too willing. The trouble is the parish is very near where Duncan grew up. The long nights in the glebe give him too much time to think about his own troubled childhood, and to drink, and to think some more. He’s already teetering when into his orbit come not only a woman he things he might love but also a boy who may have been the victim of one of his perverted charges: his fault, his chanced of redemption, his comeuppance. Pushed to the breaking point by loneliness, tragedy and sudden self-knowledge, Duncan set out on a course of action that reveals how hidden obsessions and guilty secrets either find their way to the light of understanding, or poison any chance we have for love ans spiritual peace. (-book jacket)