Quite simply, William Baer’s “Advocatus Diaboli” is contemporary Christian fiction at its finest. It is much more than a mere murder mystery. It is a voyage of discovery, a spiritual adventure, which takes us deeper into the mysteries of faith.

Recreational reading is one of the joys of life. It’s such a pleasure, at the end of the day, to escape from screens and all forms of technobabble by cracking open the pages of a book. These days my recreational reading tends to oscillate between the classics of the literary canon and works of contemporary fiction by living authors. With respect to the latter, I’ve just finished reading a novel, Advocatus Diaboli, by contemporary Catholic novelist, William Baer.

This was not the first time that I’d enjoyed the work of this particular author. I had read his previous volume, Time Square and Other Stories, a few years ago and reviewed it for The Imaginative Conservative back in November 2020. Plucking lines from this review, I found that earlier volume to contain “romance in the best and non-schmaltzy sense”, that it was “literary in the non-pretentious sense”, and that it contained mystery “in the most quirkily imaginative sense”. All these characteristics are present in the new novel.

Those with a modicum of Latin will know that Advocatus Diaboli is “devil’s advocate”. Many might not know, however, that this is the title that was once given to the person appointed by the Catholic Church to argue against the canonization of a potential saint. The role of the advocatus diaboli was the discovery of any character flaws in the candidate for canonization or any misrepresentation of the evidence favouring canonization. It might be said, therefore, that the devil’s advocate is a professional sceptic whose purpose is to presume that a holy person is guilty until or unless he is proven innocent.

The protagonist of the novel, Robert Rankin, is a devil’s advocate in this latter sense of the word who is appointed to investigate the life of a religious sister who many believe to be a saint and to whose intercession miracles have been attributed. As for Robert Rankin himself, he is a theologian, author and academic, who is considered a leading authority on the Council of Trent, the Church council of the mid-sixteenth century which defined and guided the Catholic Church’s response to the challenges of Lutheranism and Calvinism. He is, however, when we first meet him, in the throes of a crisis of faith, or perhaps even a loss of faith, caused by the tragic early death of his beloved wife. He is still young, only thirty-four years of age. Overshadowed by the pangs of bereavement, his grief gives way to a grievance against the God who had permitted the death of his wife. Feeling that grace had been sucked from his life and with a faith faltering on the brink of disbelief, he is perfectly suited to play the sceptic in his investigation into the life of the nun, Sister Adelaide Bruckner, and the alleged miracles that have been attributed to her intercession.

With the memory of his wife looming large, Rankin struggles with guilt when he finds himself attracted to Erin Montgomery, a feisty investigative journalist who is convinced that the nun, prior to her taking the veil, was involved in the murder of a U.S. senator, who is Erin Montgomery’s own grandfather. Then there’s Veronica Yeats, the young single mother whose desperate prayers to Sister Adelaide led to the alleged miraculous healing of her newborn child. Rankin finds himself becoming romantically involved with both women, the resultant love triangle further complicating his troubled faith.

Since Advocatus Diaboli is a murder mystery, it would be remiss of any reviewer to betray the many twists and turns in the story, and there are many. It’s a real page-turner, which keeps the reader guessing and second guessing, which is the mark of any good mystery novel. Since, therefore, the giving of answers or even clues is anathema, we’ll have to settle for the asking of those questions which the novel eventually answers: Is Sister Adelaide a saint or is she a murderess? Is it possible that she could be both? Or is she neither? And how will the love triangle resolve itself? Does Rankin find happiness and healing with the feisty femme formidable, Erin Montgomery, or with the serene but no less formidable Veronica Yeats? And what of Rankin’s faith? Does it remain on the rocks, perhaps wrecked by the experience of life and love, or by the hard truths that he discovers as the devil’s advocate? Or does it emerge scarred but otherwise unscathed or perhaps even strengthened by his close encounters with sin and sanctity?

Although it would not be appropriate for a reviewer to spoil the potential reader’s enjoyment of the mystery by offering answers to any of the foregoing questions, I might perhaps say that I was satisfied by the answers given. Nonetheless, and playing devil’s advocate myself, which is the role of any good reviewer, I will confess that I found myself a little frustrated by a couple of flaws in the plot, which begged questions that remained unanswered. Such frustrations aside, and putting the devil to one side having paid him his due, these blemishes do not spoil the overall sense of satisfaction that one experiences when the final page is turned and the final mystery is solved.

Having enjoyed William Baer’s indubitable gifts as a writer of short stories, as expressed in my earlier review, and having enjoyed his formalist approach to poetry in the two volumes of his verse which I own, Psalter: A Sequence of Catholic Sonnets (2011) and Formal Salutations: New and Selected Poems (2019), I can now state that he is also an excellent and very enjoyable novelist. He has shown himself as such in the consummate manner in which he portrays goodness without ever succumbing to preachiness and the way in which the story, layered with grittiness, twists and turns from one new surprising revelation to another. I couldn’t put it down until I had finished reading it which is why I think that more people should be picking it up so that they can begin reading it. Quite simply, Advocatus Diaboli is contemporary Christian fiction at its finest. It is much more than a mere murder mystery. It is a voyage of discovery, a spiritual adventure, which takes us deeper into the mysteries of faith.

If I were truly to play devil’s advocate, arguing on the devil’s behalf, I would suggest that this book should remain unread. It edifies. It raises the mind and heart of the reader towards the divine. Playing devil’s advocate, I would suggest that the devil does not want you to read this book. Is there a better reason for doing so?

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The featured image, uploaded by Robert Frank Gabriel, is a photograph, “Nun Deep in Prayer” (May 2011). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.