VESPERS The cops of the 87th Precinct must cast the first stone in the bizarre case of murdered priest and a parish torn apart by the deadliest of sins.

There are a lot of unspeakable things that happen in the big city, and the murder of St. Catherine’s Father Birney is one of them. For Detectives Carella and Hawes of the 87th Precinct, finding the killer means taking a journey into the darkest corners of the city’s soul.

The satanic cult near St. Catherine’s parish is the obvious first suspect―but not necessarily the right one. As the detectives investigate the priest’s life, they uncover blackmail, old grudges, and hidden motives….

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Chapter 1

It was his custom to reflect upon worldly problems during evening prayers, reciting the litany by rote, the prayers a mumbled counterpoint to his silent thoughts.

The Priest.

At such times, he thought of himself as The Priest. The T and the P capitalized. The Priest. As if by distancing himself in this way, by referring to himself in the third person as if he were someone not quite himself…

…a character in a novel or a movie, perhaps…

…someone outside his own body, someone exalted and remote, to be thought of with reverence as solely The Priest. By thinking of himself in this manner, by sorting out The Priest’s problems as the problems of someone other than himself, Father Michael could…

Because, you see…

It was he, Father Michael, who could find comfort in the evening prayers, he who could whisper vespers for his solace as the shadows lengthened in the small, stone-paved garden behind the church rectory. But it was The Priest who had to cope with all the troubles that had befallen him since the middle of March, more than he quite knew how to handle, more than mere prayer could—but that was blasphemy.

Vespers was the sixth of the seven canonical hours.

At the seminary, he’d memorized the order of the prayers as a bit of rhyming doggerel:

Matins is the morning prayer,
At six comes Prime too soon.
Tierce comes three hours hence
And Sext is said at noon.

Nones is said at three p.m.
Nine hours past the sun.
Vespers is the evening prayer,
And when the day is done…Complin’s said.
And so to bed.

The Priest was thirty-two years old now.

Those soft, serene days at the seminary seemed a hundred years ago.

God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me. Glory to the Father.

The Liturgy of the Hours was as complex and as rigid as the timetable for a space shot. Not only were there daily prayers for the seven different canonical hours, but there were special prayers as well for the Season of Advent and the Christmas Season, and for before and after Holy Week and before and after…