Blood of the Lamb: A Novel of Secrets

Under the Cabot pseudonym, Edgar-winner S.J. Rozan (Ghost Hero and 10 other Lydia Chin/Bill Smith novels) teams with academic Carlos Dews on this audacious supernatural religious thriller. Lorenzo Cardinal Cossa, who has just been named Vatican archivist and librarian, asks Fr. Thomas Kelly, an American Jesuit, to come to Rome. Cossa needs Kelly’s help in locating a missing agreement, the Concordat, signed by Pope Martin V in 1431. The archivist has good reason to fear that the document’s public disclosure would seriously damage the Catholic Church, since the Concordat was made, as the authors reveal early on, with the “Godless Noantri,” otherwise known as vampires. This novel concept sets the book apart from all the other Da Vinci Code imitations, and the inevitable human-vampire romance will appeal to the Twilight crowd, but the deeper secret may strike many readers as too over-the-top, if not actually silly. Agent: Steve Axelrod, Axelrod Agency. (Aug.)