Halo for Satan (Paul Pine #02) PDF
Preview Halo for Satan (Paul Pine #02)
Bishop McManus speaks quietly and gracefully as he finishes his story but his voice is awed. And Paul Pine knows he's very close to the biggest thing any private detective ever approached.
It's not a thing to be believed on a May morning in Chicago with the noises of traffic coming solidly into the rectory from Wabash Avenue and the hum of an airplane motor faintly audible in the distance. The Bishop has just said he has been offered a chance to buy a manuscript in the handwriting of Christ. The price, $25,000,000.
Yet the thing has to be believed a little. Everything argues against the manuscript being authentic—everything but the fact that the tall, frightened man who claims to have it is Raymond Wirtz, a ranking authority on ancient documents. One thing is certain: the Bishop must talk to Wirtz again. His is an awesome responsibility: to learn the truth about a document that could affect the very canons of Christianity. And Wirtz has disappeared.
It's a very rough way Pine has searching for Wirtz. Other people are looking for the scared paleographer—and $25,000,000. There's a svelte blonde who alternately uses Pine's shoulder to cry on and his stomach as a target. There's an ex-ruler of Chicago gangland, a dying man and a deadly one, who believes he can buy his way into the Church with the manuscript. There's a voluptuous redhead whose husband is missing with Wirtz. And after Pine has found a body in Wirtz's room there are the police, homicide cops in a homicide town, who get very tough when answers are slow.
Pine's progress is slow and painful. Twice he goes down under a blackjack; he's kidnaped; he's threatened; he's picked up by the police. And he finds with every step forward the shadow of Jafar Baijan, the strange figure whom no one knows and everyone fears.
For a time there is very little that Pine understands except that he has been hired to do a job and is going to do it. He needs that kind of pride and a lot of courage with it. The stakes in this game are fantastically high. More men die as Pine fights for a solution and a look at the manuscript. The big answer comes quickly when it comes; maybe not the way Pine has looked for it to come, but a man can't much anticipate a finish like this.
With Halo in Blood Paul Pine moved toward the select company of such characters of detective fiction as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. In Halo for Satan he is worthy of a place beside them. John Evans' books are more than just whodunits. They are absorbing novels written with skill and a fine regard for reality.
[Brought to you from the fine world of 1948 by the magic of Otto Penzler and his proto-Mysterious Press publishers.]
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