This novel can be compared to Mystic River. A priest has fallen, had been pushed or has jumped to his death. Two firends, a policman and a journalist find out what has happened. The story is told in flash backs. It is a well written saga and the characters are well-drawn. I am not sure that a Catholic priest would act this way if he took his vows seriously. ( )

THIS profoundly bleak book begins with the death of Frank Redmond, a Catholic priest. His pastor believes it is suicide and the police can find no evidence of foul play; still, Frank's boyhood friends Gabe and Andy are convinced it must be murder.

Unlike most people, these two are in a position to act on their suspicions because Gabriel Driscoll is Chief of Police and Andrew Troy a powerful and respected Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

The story of their painstaking investigation is interspersed with the past Redmond shared with his friends at a Jesuit school in the 1950s, when four of them were the stars of a swimming team.

We get to know the boys as they grow up and all but Redmond grow away from the religion of their youth. We share with him the experience that so devastated him that he fled to the seminary and the selfless and celibate life of a Catholic priest.

Although The Enemy of God is not exactly anti-Catholic, it is unlikely to become one of the pope's bedtime favourites, with its uncompromisingly hostile view of doctrinal rules, and unsympathetic, even cynical treatment of the men who make up the priesthood.

Driscoll and Troy suspect Redmond’s war against crime and drugs in his impoverished Harlem parish might have led to his being murdered, but the church stonewalls their attempts to get at the truth. His pastor accuses him of having stolen money from the collection, and indulging in affairs of “an amorous nature”, while his Bishop is frosty and unhelpful.

In the search for answers, Daley takes us back to Redmond’s years as a Marine chaplain in Vietnam where, although unarmed, he insisted on living the same life as the soldiers, sharing their conditions, going on patrol with them and coming under fire.

From Vietnam we follow him to southern Africa, where he tried to instil the tenets of basic Christianity in the remote village where he had his mission, until forced to leave by a mixture of malaria, bilharzia and general ill-health.

Back in the US he was sent to Harlem, and although the Church may have intended his new posting as a punishment for his failure to submit unconditionally to its authority, Redmond embraces his new parish as a chance to continue his work among the most disadvantaged.

In the present, Driscoll and Troy press on, but every avenue they explore is a cul-de-sac: there is no indication that Redmond was murdered, but neither can his two oldest friends find any reason for him to have committed suicide.

While Redmond's life of service was not happy, we learn that the lives of his friends who rejected their faith are also troubled by their caring more about their jobs than their families.

Driscoll’s wife is dying in a wheelchair and Troy is estranged from his; but ultimately she can provide answers to the puzzle of Redmond's death.

The climax of the book is profoundly disappointing: after nearly 400 pages of investigation into the suspicious suicide of a devout Catholic priest, we learn what? That, enormous surprise, there was a woman in his life.

Who is the titular Enemy of God? Redmond thinks it is him but Daley seems to indicate it is Catholic belief and doctrine. Given free will, I am not convinced. Possibly the enemy of God is plain old human nature. Read the book and decide for yourself. ( )