Articles of Faith

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. (June)