Catechisms

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By AP Sanders

There is a reason the cover of Catechisms borrows its epigraph from Rilke: Every angel is terrifying. The novel earns that warning on its very first pages, when a lonely young boy named Simon Peters arrives at a Jesuit boarding school for evening tutoring and leaves changed in ways no boy should ever have to carry.

James W Bennetts structures his debut around two timelines that shadow each other across the book. In the prologue, set in the dim lamplight of a priest’s study, he renders a grooming and assault with enough care and restraint to make it devastating rather than exploitative. The boy’s confusion, his brief sense of having been singled out as special, and the sudden terrible shift in the room are written with an understated precision that lodges in the reader long after the scene ends.

The novel then pivots to St. Paul, Minnesota, and to Detective Sergeant Paige McGraw, a cop whose career is already in freefall when a mutilated body turns up in the law section of a Catholic university library. Her partner, the sharp and unpredictable Inspector Clarissa Wright, arrives with fresh eyes and a talent for finding things people would rather stay hidden. Together they make an appealing and convincing pair, full of the kind of friction that suggests a long working relationship still being negotiated.

What Bennetts is doing, across both storylines, is tracing the long reach of institutional violence and the way institutions protect themselves. The catechisms of the title are not just religious lessons. They are the repeated questions and answers that keep systems intact, that train the faithful not to look too closely at what their faith has permitted.

The writing is assured and atmospheric, with a feel for the particular quality of summer heat in the Upper Midwest and a genuine gift for suspense. Catechisms is a dark, careful, and deeply felt novel that asks hard questions about what we teach people to accept.

About the Author

James W Bennetts

James W Bennetts is an author, consultant, and native of Minnesota, where he lives with his partner. CATECHISMS is his second novel, following up his internationally published first novel, THE NAME GAME, about a thief who mistakenly assumes the identity of a wanted man.