From Publishers Weekly
Sharply etched characters who owe a lot to the darker side of Dickens lift Brodrick's sequel to his well-received debut, The Sixth Lamentation (2003), which introduced Father Anselm, an English lawyer turned monk. Unfortunately, many of the descriptive scenesβa homeless man endlessly sharing toast and hot chocolate with a shrewd London female barrister for whom he acts as an informant, for exampleβstart off with poignant power, but eventually become just padding. At the time of her death by heart attack, this highly principled woman, Elizabeth Glendinning, was trying to correct a miscarriage of justice that she and Father Anselm had been involved in when he was still a lawyer. A convicted sex criminal was set free who had always proclaimed his innocence and blamed the crimes on his employer, known only as "The Pieman," whose identity has never been revealed to readersβuntil now. Brodrick has all the right moves, but fewer slices of toast would have made for a tighter plot. (Sept.)
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From Booklist
Starred Review Many novelists working in crime try to deepen readers' involvement by always upping the ante: more bodies, more gore, more misery. Brodrick, a monk-turned-barrister whose hero, Father Anselm, is a barrister-turned-monk, does the opposite with riveting results. When Elizabeth Glendinning dies suddenly, she leaves behind a tangle of mysterious directions but one overriding imperative: "Leave it to Anselm." Anselm plays out his friend and former associate's complex but flawed scheme, learning that her last acts were attempts to undo a long-ago evil and discovering even more than she'd meant him to. Though wise, Anselm is no supersleuth, rather "shy and boyish, as if he were on his way to the podium to pick up the diligence prize after all the clever children had returned to their seats." And Brodrick's England is a somber place that stands somehow out of time, lending an allegorical quality to the several journeys here. But Brodrick gains remarkable power from the life-or-death seriousness with which he treats his characters' moral travails, of the urgent value he places on something often ignored in crime fiction--their souls. With just his second novel (The 6th Lamentation, 2003), Brodrick already writes like a master. Keir Graff
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