The subject of this long and intriguing novel is the Vatican's elaborate bureaucracy, in particular its powerful financial network, headed by a mysterious figure known as the Keeper. Another central character, who gives the story its slant, is American Richard Lansing, who joins the Vatican as a young monsignore in 1945, and becomes the confidant of five successive popes. When he reaches the apex of his career, he staunchly opposes any Church bargain with Mammon. Martin (author of bestsellers The Final Conclave and Hostage to the Devil), was a professor in the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Institute: he has an insider's knowledge of the intrigues and power plays that go on behind the papacy's smooth facade. His tale encompasses the fall of Mussolini, the penetration of the Vatican by a Soviet mole, the murder of a pope in the Soviet interest (with help from Vatican officials), and other major events real or imagined. Vatican is not unlike a bureaucracy itself: intricate, far from iconoclastic, and impeded in its forward progress by obsessive attention to detail. [Publishers Weekly]