Dark Sonnet

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 Jeremy, a genial but lackluster Oxford don, has stumbled upon a tattered and unpublished manuscript by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.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.

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