The Blind Side of the Heart

White's detailed and engrossing second novel (after A Brother's Blood) follows class tensions, shame and loyalty among New England's Irish-American Catholics when a scandal shakes a small-town church. Eighteen years before the novel begins, Father John Thomas Devlin rescued White's appealing, ingenuous narrator, Irish immigrant Maggie ""Ma"" Quinn, from alcoholism, prostitution and destitution. Since then, she's worked as the loyal live-in housekeeper at the rectory of his church in western Massachusetts. Maggie is stunned and disbelieving when two adult brothers, Bobby and Russell Roby, allege that the upright, selfless, and hardworking priest molested them when they were boys, 15 years ago. As police and press descend on their community, gossip swirls around Maggie and Father Jack; townsfolk begin to ostracize them. Maggie, like the reader, gradually begins to doubt the priest she once trusted. After Father Jack is arrested and relieved of his duties, Maggie starts drinking heavily, and inadvertently gives damaging testimony at Father Jack's trial. When the priest accepts a plea bargain, Maggie considers his four-year sentence her fault. Then Father Jack is indicted again, for the long-unsolved murder of an altar boy. Though her judgment seems rock solid, Maggie's drinking undermines her credibility as a narrator. Yet her melancholy, singular voice is so strong, her faith in herself and in Father Jack so compelling, that readers will speed through the book in order to discover the truth. Agent, Nat Sobel. (Sept.)