Publisher Description
In the dead of night, Naomi Forman receives a phone call. Barney Harrigan, the man she once loved--now happily married with children--utters, "My wife Charlotte has been captured by the Glories." What began as a rude interruption of her night becomes a horrifying interruption of her life, as she is unable to ignore Barney's cry for help.
Drawn into the Glory Church doomsday cult by her estranged sister, Charlotte Harrigan succumbs to the will of the enigmatic Father Glory. Brainwashed beyond comprehension, she is now not herself, but only one of many who have been entrapped by the cult's promise of rebirth into a new, idyllic life.
Against her better judgment, Naomi agrees to help Barney confront the Glories and save Charlotte. But naïve optimism quickly plummets to misery as their plans are systematically picked apart, dashed by members of the cult past and present, and even by the local Sheriff T. Clausen Moore, who is only as helpful as the Glories want him to be. His awareness of the Glory's practices and their secluded compound--including the river, where there has been more than one "accidental" drowning--is the one obstacle that he too must overcome to restore order to his county. No one is safe.
Naomi's will is tested and Barney becomes more and more desperate. The lengths he is willing to go to save his wife are as sinister as the Glories themselves.
From the Manson family to Scientology, cults have been fascinating, disturbing, and terrifying, from their induction methodologies to doomsday imperatives. The Glory Church of Warren Adler's vision is no different. Just look to the headlines. Their time will come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Adler's 25th novel is a strident tale that delivers what the subtitle promises and little else. Human rights activist Naomi Forman is contacted by her former lover, Barney Harrigan, because his wife, Charlotte, has been pulled into an Oregon religious cult, leaving him and their young son, Kevin. The "Glories," who read like a combination of Moonies, Hare Krishna and Branch Davidians, see their leader, Father Glory, as the second messiah. Jewish liberal Naomi agrees to help, even as she still carries a torch for "Irish-to-the-core" Barney and suffers guilt: not only for breaking up with Barney (even after he had himself circumcised for her) but also for having secretly aborted their child before their affair ended. Between attacks of angst and sublimated yearning for Barney, Naomi explains the fundamentals of the Constitution and that, legally, there is nothing they can do. When Charlotte is discovered drowned, Barney enlists the services of deprogrammers to kidnap his dead wife's sister and another Glory mind-slave, hoping to get them to confess to murder. In turn, the Glories kidnap Kevin, and the narrative moves to an overbaked climax. Rushed and clumsily crafted, this potboiler seems to be a platform for spouting antireligious and right-wing rhetoric. Adler (War of the Roses) unblushingly equates extreme Islam and the attack on the World Trade Center with Waco and Jonestown, claiming several times that the sole motivation of Muslim terrorists is to spend eternity with 72 virgins. Well-wrought fiction will someday respond to the September tragedy in New York; this diatribe won't make the cut.
