Articles of Faith
A Thriller
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
What has long been suspected is now coming to light - that the Nazis were not the only ones who profited from their war effort; that the circles of violence reached far beyond the territories invaded by the Germans; and that the suffering continues.
Taking his cue from this growing mountain of evidence, Robert L. Rodin's "Articles of Faith" blends this story of greed and gold with his own father's deathbed tale of the battle he fought against the Nazis on American soil as a member of the OSS.
Twenty-five years after his father's suicide, Danny Maguire is raising a family of his own. A phone call on a cold winter evening shatters the steady calm. It is his father on the other end. No sooner does Sean Maguire reappear in Danny's life, then his presence threatens to destroy that life and the lives of Danny's wife and children. For with him, Sean brings a history that men of power are willing to go to desperate ends to repress. And he holds the very articles of faith that point to a sinister ring of smuggling.
It is a story of reconciliation, a story of suspense, and a story of faith. And while it is fiction - it is perhaps not far from the truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rodin takes up weighty themes--the Nazis' theft of art treasures, Swiss fencing of Nazi gold, the German clergy's accommodation with Hitler, the world's inaction to prevent the Holocaust--with a facile Hollywood sensibility in his far-fetched debut. The son of an Irish-Catholic and a German-Jewish refugee, New York contractor Danny Maguire receives a phone call from his father, who vanished nearly 30 years ago, a presumed a suicide. Their strained reunion plunges Danny into a world of skullduggery as he learns that, as an OSS agent, his father assassinated suspected Nazi spies in the U.S. Now, 75-year-old Sean Maguire is being hunted by diabolical former CIA director Francis Laughlin, who secretly traded Jewish religious artifacts looted in Europe by the Nazis. The corpse-strewn plot includes intriguing extras (Danny's Vietnamese wife, whom he rescued from prostitution in Saigon; a morally compromised rabbi; a N.Y.C. police detective fluent in ancient languages), but Rodin piles on B-movie improbabilities (e.g., Sean's recovery of a dagger that may have belonged to Judas Iscariot; Danny's meeting with the president, who abets a plot to kill Laughlin). In an afterword, Rodin states that his own father was an OSS agent who assassinated suspected Nazis on U.S. soil, and he alleges that the CIA has suppressed public knowledge of this campaign--all of which lends a confusingly newsworthy aura to this sadly contrived tale.
