Messi@
A Novel
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
At the end of the millennium, as Armageddon looms, two young women from opposite sides of the world unite as humanity’s last hope for salvation
In New Orleans, private investigator Felicity LeJeune has made it her mission to bring down the corrupt televangelist Reverend Mullin, leader of the United Ministries, who filched two million dollars in lottery winnings from Felicity’s unassuming grandmother. Meanwhile, Mullin’s flock of religious fundamentalists bombards the media with threats of catastrophic horror if people refuse to accept him as their savior.
Across the globe, the mysterious Sarajevan orphan Andrea Isbik escapes a Serbian POW camp and finds asylum in Jerusalem, where she seduces cavalcades of religious scholars before finally landing in the Big Easy herself. There, amid the reverie of Mardi Gras, something dark is building. Surrounded by a wild cast of characters, Andrea and Felicity join forces to combat the impending apocalypse, fending off millennial fervor and Mullin’s fanatical followers as the world’s religions converge on New Orleans for the end of days.
This riveting novel links our most ancient imaginings of Armageddon with our contemporary worship of technology.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Leave it to witty NPR commentator, poet, filmmaker (Road Scholar) and author Codrescu (The Blood Countess) to come up with an energetic if somewhat bloated novel about messianic fervor at the dawn of the next millennium. Felicity LeJeune, an aspiring New Orleans PI in her early 20s, waits at the deathbed of her grandmother. The dying woman, Felicity's last living relative, has long since fallen under the sway of the Rev. Jeremy "Elvis" Mullin, an evangelical preacher who collects souls as avidly as he has collected a personal fortune. With the help of the ultra-eccentric Major Notz, a family friend, Felicity decides to take down Mullin's empire--or at least blackmail him into returning the $2.5 million Mullin stole from Felicity. Halfway across the globe, meanwhile, the inhabitants of a Jerusalem convent are startled by the appearance of Andrea, an intensely sexual 16-year-old who may be a Bosnian war orphan or a Jew from Basque country. Whatever her origin, she proceeds to seduce first the convent's nuns, then a group of religious scholars living in the convent and, finally (after an appearance on Gal Gal Hamazal, the Israeli version of Wheel of Fortune), the entire Israeli populace. Through amazingly complex circumstances, Andrea relocates to New Orleans, where she fights for the fate of the postmillennial world alongside Felicity, Major Notz and the resurrected spirits of Nikola Tesla, Ovid and Mark Twain, among others, against Mullin and his hypnotized First Angels Choir. Codrescu's plot is beyond ludicrous, even for a tongue-in-cheek messianic thriller, but his writing is sprightly and his humor dead-on. Here, Codrescu gives the growing obsession with the year 2000 some of the joshing it deserves.
