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Summary
Summary
Father Dowling is used to unsolicited knocks on the rectory door, having done more than his share of counseling and assisting in delicate situations during his long career. So when Eleanor Wygant comes to visit Father Dowling he receives her graciously, though she is a stranger. As it turns out, members of her family are longtime parishioners of St. Hillary's, and it soon becomes clear that with family trouble brewing, Eleanor doesn't know where else to turn.
When she enlists Father Dowling's help in persuading her niece Jessica to scrap the tell-all family novel she is writing and concentrate on more earthly pursuits, the venerable priest has little idea how enmeshed he is about to become in the family's edgy interrelations. For in recent years, the family has had its share of melodrama, including a philandering patriarch, a son who left the priesthood to take up with an ex-nun, and an underachieving academic, and it's up to Dowling to piece together their shared history in the hopes of putting their demons-and a vicious, previously unknown murder-to rest.
In the hands of Ralph McInerny, one of mystery fiction's most beloved authors, Last Things is as delightful as his legions of fans have come to expect from the charming Father Dowling series.
Author Notes
Ralph McInerny was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on February 24, 1929. He served in the Marine Corps in the late 1940s. He received a bachelor's degree from St. Paul Seminary in 1951, a master's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1952 and a doctorate in philosophy from Laval University in Quebec in 1954. He was a member of the University of Notre Dame faculty from 1955 until 2009. He gained international renown as a scholar, author and lecturer who specialized in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. During his academic career, he was the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies and director of the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame. He is founder and publisher of Catholic Dossier magazine and co-founder of Crisis magazine.
His philosophical works include Aquinas on Human Action, The Question of Christian Ethics, and Aquinas and Analogy. His novels include the Father Dowling Mystery series, an Andrew Broom Mystery series, and the Sister Mary Teresa Mystery series. He also wrote under the pseudonyms of Harry Austin, Matthew FitzRalph, Ernan Mackey, Edward Mackin, and Monica Quill. He died on January 29, 2010 at the age of 80.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Father Dowling's 22nd absorbing outing (after 2002's Prodigal Father) from the prolific McInerny is guaranteed to mystify. Ill with prostate cancer, Fulvio Bernardo, patriarch of a wealthy and influential Chicago-area family, despairs of his three children. Raymond, the eldest, was ordained a priest and was the great white hope of St. Edmund's College until he took off for California with a nun and the nun's order's car and credit card. Daughter Jessica is an author with a contract for a novel of which the lightly disguised subject is her own family. Younger son Andrew is an English professor at St. Edmund's; enter Horst Cassirer, a brilliant Ph.D. who has recently joined the department and wants tenure immediately. But his fellow professors, despite his high reputation as a researcher, find him deficient as a teacher and colleague and reject his bid. Following the deaths of Fulvio and Raymond's Edmundite mentor comes the requisite third tragedy: Cassirer's battered body is found lying in the street. Suspects abound and the suspense builds until the final chapter, when Father Dowling has a flash of inspiration. The plot moves crisply on the wings of believable dialogue among the multitude of well-drawn college-town characters. As always, McInerny explains just enough about Catholicism to make non-Catholic readers feel at home. (July 7) FYI: The "last things" of the title are death, judgment, heaven and hell. McInerny is also the author of Celt and Pepper (2002) and other titles in his Notre Dame mystery series. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
More unrest among the ranks of the nontenured and no-longer-ordained. When pompous, arrogant Horst Cassirer, who prefers writing arcane articles for esoteric little magazines to actually teaching students at St. Edmund's College, insists he be considered for early tenure, the English department splits three to two against him. Cassirer lambastes tenure committee member Andrew Bernardo and threatens to take him to court, but this is hardly Andrew's main worry. His popular novelist sister Jessica is about to base her next book on family history; his brother Raymond, an ex-priest now living with an ex-nun in California, has returned to Chicago to reconcile, perhaps, with their critically ill father; and his twice-widowed aunt Eleanor is conniving to go through his father's papers in search of old love letters she sent her first husband's brother, the dying Fulvio. Low-key Father Ralph Dowling (Prodigal Father, 2002, etc.) doesn't make much effort to dissuade Jessica from blabbing the family secrets or to convince Fulvio, who left the church as a protest when Raymond was laicized, to make a final confession before death calls. Unfortunately, death takes not only Fulvio (natural causes) but Cassirer (baseball bat). Worse, Andrew, who finds the second body at his doorstep, decides to move it, making himself prime suspect. Amusing professorial infighting and the occasional murder take a backseat to McInerny's true concerns: dwindling seminary enrollment and the decline of faith-based education. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
McInerny returns to his long-running Father Dowling series, and once again academic infighting at St. Edmund's College leads to murder. Father Dowling first becomes involved with the Bernardo family when Eleanor Wygant asks him to try to persuade her niece, Jessica Bernardo, to stop writing a novel based on the Bernardo family. Eleanor is afraid of the resultant scandal if her long-buried secret is revealed. Meanwhile, Jessica's brother Andrew is on a committee charged with determining tenure for a young, obnoxious English professor who begins to threaten the Bernardo family when it looks like the decision may go against him. There is a murder for Father Dowling to solve, of course, but this time McInerny seems more interested in exploring the motivations and entwined family relationships of his characters. There's also plenty of the Catholic minutiae that Father Dowling fans enjoy. A solid addition to a perennially popular series. --Sue O'Brien Copyright 2003 Booklist
