Debt, The
-
- £2.99
-
- £2.99
Publisher Description
Cooper’s intelligent, heart-pounding homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Da Vinci Code will appeal to fans of action, thriller and conspiracy genres Booklist
An ancient loan made by Pope Pius VIII wreaks havoc in the present… The new religious conspiracy thriller featuring Cal Donovan.
While browsing the Vatican libraries, Harvard professor Cal Donovan uncovers a secret that could bankrupt the Catholic church. Unearthing evidence of a 200-year-old loan which the Vatican owes to a Jewish bank, Cal deduces that, with centuries of interest behind it, the sum now amounts to a crippling 25 billion Euros. With the future of the Vatican at stake, Pope Celestine asks Cal to intercede with the Sassoon family to whom the sum is owed.
Thus Cal finds himself drawn into the tangled affairs of the wealthy yet dysfunctional Sassoons. With eye-watering sums of money involved and the Vatican facing bankruptcy, everyone has their own agenda. Who can be trusted? If Cal isn’t careful, he’ll find more than his own life in danger…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Cooper's unremarkable third Cal Donovan thriller (after 2018's Three Marys), an unexpected discovery rocks the foundations of the Catholic Church. Cal, a Harvard professor whose previous service to Pope Celestine was rewarded with an all-access pass to the Vatican archives, finds a reference, while researching the revolutions of the Italian states in 1848, to a 19th-century loan to the church made by the Jewish Sassoon banking firm. The Sassoons lent the sum under duress after a family member was held hostage; the loan was never repaid. Including compound interest, the church's debt now amounts to about $27 billion. The pope, who takes the crisis as an opportunity to get a handle on the church's wealth, proposes to sell enough assets to pay off the debt and found a charitable foundation in partnership with the Sassoons. The plan, of course, triggers violent opposition, placing both Cal's life and the pope's at risk. Cooper fails to make the plot conceit believable, and neither the characters nor the prose rise above routine. Cooper's attempt to spin a religious tale without great theological implications falls flat.
