The Enemy of God

by Robert Daley

Book Overview

Gabe Driscoll, Chief of Internal Affairs for the NYPD, stands in the city morgue watching an autopsy. His interest is more than professional. The body is that of activist priest Frank Redmond, who... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 015101244X
• ISBN13: 9780151012442
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 386 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Thoughts on the Enemy of God

I have just finished reading the Enemy of God by Robert Daley. After reading many books through a long life time of experiencing many, many writers works I found this book to be in my top ten reading experiences. Booklist reviewed it thusly, "This is a moving, emotionally draining novel..Think Mystic River, but maybe better." I agree whole heartedly! For someone with a mature, open mind (Catholics may be offended)this will be a very worthwhile read. It is a mystery but even more, it is an unexpected love story. Enjoy, I did!

Welcome Back Mr. Daley!!

It seems as though it has been at least a decade since Robert Daley has authored a novel. Though this book has had mixed reviews on this forum I thoroughly enjoyed it. The plot moved quickly and the characters were nicely developed. The authors experience as a NYPD deputy commissioner definitely helps contribute to his authoritativeness. Briefly the story chronicles the lives of four main characters who met at Fordham Prep when they were on the swim team. They all went on to live eventful,accomplished professional lives. One as chief of internal affairs for the NYPD, another became a candidate for District Attorney,the third was a top newspaper columnist and the fourth a priest in Harlem. The priest fell off a building. Was it murder or suicide? The book goes back and forth thru investigative and flashback chapters to find the answer. Excellent and fast paced read.

The Enemy of God

This novel, by Robert Daley, is outstanding. He characterizes not only the main character but four additional characters as well. His depth of knowledge of his subject makes this novel the type of book one wishes would not end; it's that good. I have recommended it to several friends and acquaintances.

The richness and ultimate tragedy of ordinary lives.

This is in an odd way a police procedural, but among the richest such i have ever read. A priest is dead. Frank Redmond, a Catholic priest, fell into the street from a New York rooftop. Was it murder or, as the detectives at the scene believe, a suicide? Deputy Chief Gabe Driscoll wants to know and pushes the precinct to investigate. Driscoll is perilously close to stepping on the toes of other police officers. He is the head of Internal Affairs and has no right to be involving himself in the investigation of a declared suicide which might be a murder. But it doesn't matter to Driscoll: Father Redmond, you see, was a friend of his since high school. He enlists the help of Andrew Troy, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and also a friend since high school of Driscoll and the late Father Redmond, to investigate the death. Thus begins the unraveling of seven lives. It is an absorbing and sad tale beginning with these four young men and their achievements as a swim team and the quarter-century after. I have rarely read anything so sad. These men are all ordinary, though each of them was brave in their own ways. Driscdll has risen through the New York Police Department to two-star rank as an honest cop who solved homicides. Troy is a globe-hopping journalist who has won a sterling reputation for the honesty of his writing. Earl Finley, another member of the quartet, strives diligently as a prosecutor to seek truth in the criminal courts of a city overrun by crime. And Frank Redmond becomes a priest who serves with the military in VietNam, spends years in Africa tending to the poorest of the poor and comes home to serve the poor again in Harlem. Redmond is dead: a priest dead perhaps by his own hand - or possibly by the hand of one of the bad people he has kept from preying on his flock. Driscoll and Troy search for the truth. Intrinsic to the story is the Roman Catholic Church and a woman, the teenage love of the late Father Redmond. There are no Wagnerian heroics in this novel, but heroic acts abound just in the daily lives of the main characters. Daley has created characters unique and powerful in their ordinariness. We all know people like those Daley writes abou, for they are to one degeee or another ourselves. This is not a happy book. The calvary do not come riding over the hill in the nick of time. Rather the investigation of Driscoll and Troy exposes a love story and in that love story is tragedy. I highly recommend "The Enemy Of God." But save it for a day you feel able to cope with the sadness of life. Jerry

"The strongest ones don't bend, they break'

Gabe Driscoll, Earl Finley, Andrew Troy and Frank Redmond are the crux of an award-winning swim team at Fordham Prep in New York, bonded by their athletic victories, Catholic religion and easy friendship. These boys will grow up to be Chief of Internal Affairs, a prosecutor with an eye on public office, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a priest. But on a cold day in Harlem, Father Redmond plunges to his death in his parish, leaving Gabe Driscoll and Andy Troy to determine the cause of death, suicide or murder. Father Frank's demise awakens the past for the now middle-aged men, the sweet memories of their years together still fresh, making the death all the more painful and suspicious. The quest for resolution takes on a life of its own, as Driscoll mines his police sources for an investigation of anyone who might have wanted Redmond out of the way, drug dealers or gang members, perhaps. Regardless of their efforts, the cop and the journalist are hard-pressed to learn anything helpful about their friend, who is a cipher, his monastic life devoid of clues. The truth of the matter is revealed in flashbacks to the earlier years of these men, from their youth to their adult lives, the more private aspects of each, the disappointments and moral dilemmas that define them. Although this is a tough story, years of friendship shared from Catholic school through careers and marriages, there is great energy in the telling, the school years, the Vietnam experience, generational changes that affect the kind of men they become. Shifting from past to present, it is easy to identify with their history of youthful dreams and the lessons learned along the way. Daley writes as if he knows this territory intimately, and for that reason, the characters and plot are entirely believable. Daley's story is particularly affecting, as these four men are so like their generation, although they are not as familiar with the women in their lives. This, perhaps, is the fatal flaw in the investigation: Driscoll and Troy have looked at Frank's world through their own eyes, a prism that is distorted by its very maleness. It is the women who are most intuitive, who have watched Father Redmond in all his flawed humanity, felt compassion for his struggles as a man and a priest. From the Bronx to Harlem, from Vietnam to Africa, the novel follows friendship in all its permutations; but it is those unexpected moments of loss, inexplicable events that question how well one man really knows another and just how much of this road is tread irrevocably alone. Luan Gaines/2005.