The Devil's Interval

Book excerpt: Harry MacPherson, an Episcopal priest and writer of thrillers, is approached for help by Mark Raven, whose marriage to Roselyn West Harry has celebrated over twenty years earlier. To discover the father she’s never known, Céline Marquand, the daughter of Mark’s dead lover, Benedict, wants to read her father’s letters to Mark. Her arrival from France risks compromising Mark’s marriage to Roselyn, who is ignorant of her husband’s past. Céline eventually meets their son, Richard, and the children of male lovers fall in love. Meanwhile, the willful and beautiful Lidia Quintavalle also seeks Harry’s help after she is charged with inducing the death of her wealthy husband, Serge Meredith. All these alliances and misalliances are channeled into Harry’s new thriller, The Case of Dante’s Bones, about a mad professor obsessed with burying Beatrice’s remains with Italy’s greatest poet. Under one fictional roof several stories are linked: a triple romance, a thriller based on theft and burial, a memoir of sexual love lost and recovered. The relations between Harry and Lidia, Lidia and Serge, Mark and Benedict, Mark and Roselyn, Céline and Richard are all caught up in the stridency of THE DEVIL’S INTERVAL. Resonating together, the stories fill in the dissonance and sound the strongest chord in Western music, but not before the novel’s jarring, jangling finale.