That's Quart. Father Quart

By John Elson

What gall! A hacker has evaded the Vatican's electronic defenses and impiously placed a message in the Pope's personal computer. The interloper begs the Holy Father to help save Seville's 17th century church of Our Lady of the Tears, threatened by the wrecker's ball. Who is this modem-armed intruder? And why should the Pontiff intervene to preserve a crumbling edifice with a handful of worshippers?

Answering those questions is clearly a job for Father Lorenzo Quart, ace trouble-shooter at the Vatican's cloak-and-dagger Institute of External Affairs. Although lacking Agent 007's license to kill, Quart is distinctly Bondish: tall, cool, impeccably clad and cursed with dreamboat looks that fluster women into worrying if their lipstick is on straight.

His sojourn in Spain is recounted with panache and subtlety in Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Seville Communion (Harcourt Brace; 375 pages; $24), one of those infrequent whodunits that transcend the genre. The investigating priest is soon dipping into an olla podrida involving cupidity, lost love and sudden deaths at the church that may or may not have been accidents. Among those defending the church is the imperious noblewoman Macarena Bruner, whose Carmen-like beauty disturbs the celibate priest. She's the estranged wife of a banker who faces financial ruin if a sneaky real estate deal that would raze Our Lady falls through. Lurking on the sidelines are a sleazoid journalist with a bent for blackmail, and Seville's worldly archbishop, whose diocese will profit if the church is destroyed.

Abandoning his studied neutrality, Quart eventually performs a priestly act that saves Our Lady of the Tears, but at the cost of his ecclesiastical career. In doing so, the priest, who imagines himself a kind of modern Knight Templar, finds his true self by breaking through the armor of discipline and obedience that has served him as a surrogate for faith.

A veteran TV journalist, Perez-Reverte is Spain's most popular author--understandably so. Besides its page-turning pace and vivid characters, The Seville Communion sensitively explores the lonely quest of priests and nuns for assurance in a world where God's voice is heard barely as a whisper, if at all. The novel's evocation of Seville's magic may well inspire readers to order round-trip tickets to an ancient city redolent of jasmine and orange blossoms.

--By John Elson