The Island of Lost Priests

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Catholic Church saved him. At the moment he needed someone most, Father Joe offered him salvation. And he spent his life, and career, trying to live by the rules and order of the Catholicism.

But when he returns to Brooklyn to work for the Church after years as a Chicago detective, he finds himself investigating those he thought beyond reproach. And the deeper he digs, the more questions he finds—about his past, about himself, and about the future of the very faith he once considered his salvation.

This alternate history story, originally written for the Vatican Vaults anthology, takes place in a world where Pope John Paul (I) does not die a month after his accession in 1978 but instead reforms the Church and opens up the most secret parts of the Vatican Library to scholars. New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch explores what might have happened if some Church secrets came to light years earlier than they have in our own reality.

“Rusch weaves a convincing alternate history tale of ‘what ifs’ that interlaces with our own history of those troubled times.”

—Astro Guyz on The Enemy Within

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536553147

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. She publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov's Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.   

Book preview

I could only find three direct references to the Island of Lost Priests in the Vatican’s records, and only one mentions the island by that rather subjective—and, as I later learned, rather apt—nickname.

The other two references are buried in financial and property files. One reference is a line-item in a centuries-old budget; the other is simply a map of the various properties owned by the Church.

Taken together, they form a slight trail to a secret and a conundrum, a forgotten history of a time everyone wants to forget, and a moment of opportunity which was, unsurprisingly, squandered.

***

I’m considered something strange in the modern era. I’m an American who converted to Catholicism—not because I married into the faith, but because I wanted to become a Catholic. I officially converted in my twenties, but for all intents and purposes, I became a believer in my early teens.

I love an ordered way of doing things. I adore the patterns and the liturgy. I adore knowing what to expect in a service and what I’m supposed to do.

I first encountered the Church because of Father Joseph O’Malley. June, 1950. I can’t remember the exact date, but it had to be mid-month, because my dad, a teacher, had the summer off.

I knew even then that things would only get worse. That false hope that so many kids had when life went sideways forever and ever—it wasn’t for me. Maybe I was morbid, or maybe, even at age twelve, I was a realist.

Back then, Brooklyn was the center of my world. My mother had died in a terrible car accident on New Year’s Eve, and my dad wanted to die too. He didn’t have the courage to off himself; he spent the next ten years carving away at himself with cigarettes and alcohol when a gun would’ve been so much quicker.

By the time his body left—in a gutter not too far from my childhood home, riddled with cancer, and skeletal from malnutrition—the man I knew before the accident had been dead for years.

That day, twenty-five years ago, I sat on the steps of a neighborhood bar, and waited for the right moment to pull my dad out of it and try to get him home. The air was so humid it felt alive—or maybe that was the stench of day-old vomit, cigarettes, and alcohol that oozed up from the edge of the alley off to my right.

I was worried about dinner. The twenty I’d caged from my dad’s wallet the day school ended had lasted me nearly two weeks. I bought groceries and cooked as best I could for a kid who’d never cracked a cookbook before January. I didn’t know budgeting, and I didn’t know how to shop, but I was learning.

But the money was out except for three dollars, and I was wondering if I should feed myself somehow—get a slice, maybe—or try