Mother of Mercy rocketed to the top 200 list in the Amazon UK Kindle Store within a month of its release, an unusual feat for a debut novel. But then it's an unusual novel, a dark story with threads of warmth and humor running through it and a peculiarly funny autopsy scene.
This is the story of a young man who is convinced that the Virgin Mary has appeared to him and given him a mission, to call everyone to renounce their sinful ways and return to lives of virtue and devotion - by kidnapping attractive young women, torturing them until they confess their sins, then killing them and leaving their bodies in public places with notes urging repentance.
The police enlist a priest/psychologist to help them make sense out of all this, but he has some dark places of his own, and that complicates matters. The investigation leads them into tattoo parlors and dark basements where desperate men try to tame their flesh in the service of the spirit, while the killer's voice leads the reader through a series of journal entries illuminating his own journey.
In the end, killer and priest come face-to-face over the body of a woman they both know and care about, and their struggles come to a climax.
This is a story about the reasons that some people do terrible things with the best of intentions, about the ways that we struggle to reconcile spirituality and sexuality, and about what can happen when these struggles go wrong.
Who is Lee Charles? Certainly, this is not a debut novel…. My money is on Lee Charles being the pseudonym of an established writer branching out.
>>> Kevin Dyer
But my favorite part of the book was the dialogue, not just between characters, but also what the characters were thinking to themselves. It was natural and usually a little bit funny. It's also the kind of novel you can read on two levels: reading quickly to finally find out who done it or a little more slowly, contemplating the issue that the author is identifying.