Showing results by author "Morris West" in All Categories

Paul Desmond admires his close friend George Harlequin for his impeccable European breeding. Head of a prestigious Swiss bank, Harlequin belongs to a vanishing class of gentlemen whose handshake is their bond. Then their gilded world is blown apart. A computer printout identifies the Harlequin et Cie bank as the target of a gigantic takeover. The mastermind is Basil Yanko, a ruthless financial genius whose instruments are fraud, blackmail and terror. As the conflict moves from Zurich to London, New York and Mexico, Harlequin must become a 'villain by necessity'.

In an impoverished village in southern Italy, the enigmatic life and mysterious death of Giacomo Nerone has inspired talk of sainthood. Father Blaise Meredith, a dying English priest, is sent by the Vatican to investigate. As he tries to untangle the web of facts, rumours and outright lies that surround Nerone, we are reminded how the power of goodness ultimately prevails over despair.

Pope Gregory XVII has spent a lifetime quietly serving the church he loves - until he announces a prophecy so alarming that it threatens to tear the Vatican apart. Terrified, the Vatican cardinals imprison him in a monastery. Is he mad, as they believe, or is it all an elaborate plot? An old friend of the pope sets out on a risky quest to find out. On the way, he discovers the power of love and faith, while terrorists and politicians use every deadly and unholy means to stop him.

This is the story of Kiril Lakota, a cardinal who reluctantly steps out from behind the Iron Curtain to lead the Catholic Church and to grapple with the many issues facing the contemporary world. The pope is dead, and the corridors of the Vatican hum with intrigue as cardinals gather to elect his successor. The result is a surprise: the new pope is the youngest of them all - a bearded Ukrainian. The Shoes of the Fisherman is the moving story of Kiril I, recently released from 17 years in Siberian labour camps and haunted by his past.

On Bryan Cavanagh's birthday, a sealed letter from Rome arrives, bearing the arms of the ancient house of the Farnese di Mongrifone. Affectionate, even imperious, it is a summons from the woman he loved - and lost - in the turbulent, opportunistic world of postwar Europe.

Iron-fisted Pope Leo XIV emerges from open-heart surgery with the chilling realisation that his reforms have devastated the Church. As he struggles to overcome the policies he himself put in place, he must battle enemies from within the Vatican, as well as Islamic terrorists determined to assassinate him. Amid political intrigue and counterespionage, his brilliant Surgeon, Salviati, becomes a target, too, along with Salviati’s beautiful mistress, Tove, and her fragile daughter, as the plot builds to a dramatic climax.

A famous writer travels to the remote, windswept islands of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides looking for peace of mind and a chance to dispel his inner demons. On the way, a car accident throws him together with the raven-haired Doctor Kathleen McNeil. He also falls in with the Red Wolf, a man who lives by the old codes - some of them violent. As a love triangle develops, the refined, civilised writer finds himself pitted against the rough-hewn man of nature.

An Italian general is found dead in his apartment. Next to his body is a small card inscribed with a salamander in a bed of flames. Is it suicide or murder? Dante Matucci, a captain in the Italian secret service, begins an investigation that leads him into a maze of political violence and intrigue. He meets the general’s former mistress, Lili Anders, and embarks on a dangerous affair with the beautiful onetime spy.

Autumn 1990. The world is teetering on the edge of war in the Gulf, Germany is reunited and a crumbling USSR stares ruin in the face. In Japan, a group of powerful men and women gather to create a rescue plan that will bring all three countries together for the first time in 50 years. Polyglot international publisher Gill Langton is mediator-in-chief. Treading the highest wire of global power-broking, he alone can balance politics with intrigue, manoeuvre with counter-manoeuvre. But his love for the beautiful, enigmatic Martha could bring it all tumbling down.

A fast-paced tale of intrigue and murder in the international art world. When the daughter of an old Florentine family dies, she leaves a bequest to her lover Max Mather, an American art historian who has been managing the family's rare art collection. Mather is left with two priceless artworks by the great Renaissance master Raphael - without the family's knowledge. As Mather contrives to have the artworks discovered at auction in New York, big-time collectors, dealers and auctioneers are drawn into his game.

American Ambassador Maxwell Gordon Amberley has a reputation as a tough negotiator. Yet when he is sent to Vietnam, the dilemma he faces throws him into self-doubt. He is made arbiter of his nation’s fate on the one hand and of the life and death of the ruling house of Vietnam on the other. Out of every international crisis comes at least one great story.

Charles Parnell Cassidy is a powerful politician. Martin Gregory is his disenchanted protégé, who, having married Cassidy's daughter and become a success on his own terms, scorns his father-in-law. When the terminally ill Cassidy arrives in London to die, he makes Gregory the executor of his will and sets a complex trap by offering him the keys to a vast empire of wealth and corruption, spanning Australia and Southeast Asia.

Twenty chests of minted Spanish gold in a sunken galleon - this is the lure that brings historian Renn Lundigan to a tiny island off Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Renn enlists islander Johnny Akimoto to teach him scuba diving but soon realises there's a far greater danger in the reef than the sharks. Gambling den owner Manny Mannix has followed him to the island, and now he threatens not only Renn and Johnny but also the beautiful young scientist Pat Mitchell.

Set in pre-World War I Europe, The World Is Made of Glass is a powerful novel of love, sexual obsession, murder and guilt. A cryptic and mysterious case history appears in the autobiography of pioneering Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung: ‘A lady came to my office. She refused to give her name. What she had to communicate to me was a confession. Some 20 years ago, she had committed a murder.’ Jung’s encounter with the woman had an explosive effect on him and brought him very close to total breakdown.

At high noon on a hot summer’s day, a beautiful young woman shoots the mayor dead. So begins a story of passion and betrayal in a quiet Tuscan village, leading to a sensational trial. The defence team, headed by the brilliant but unhappy Carlo Rienzi, uncovers a sinister conspiracy of silence that threatens to split the community. Can Carlo persuade the judge to grant clemency in what appears to be an open-and-shut case? Can the law intervene in the brutal tradition of vendetta?  

Big John Spada is a self-made millionaire. From his headquarters in New York, he directs enterprises around the world with military precision. Privately, Spada also funds Proteus, a clandestine movement that works to free political prisoners and combat tyrants wherever they may be. Then news arrives from Argentina that the Buenos Aires secret police have arrested Spada’s daughter, Teresa, a Doctor, after she performed emergency surgery on a man with gunshot wounds. They then take her husband, Rodolfo, whose outspoken editorials have angered the country’s fascist government.

Son of a Norwegian master-mariner and grandson of Kaloni, the last of the great Polynesian navigators, Gunnar Thorkild is a man consumed by a dream. Convinced that the Polynesians’ legendary Island of the Dead is real, he risks his career, his life – and those of his fellow adventurers – to find it. Shipwrecked on the very island they seek, the castaways are forced to leave behind everything they know and rely upon. To survive in this lush tropical paradise, they must make new laws of power and property, of sex and marriage.

As a young and outspoken priest, Luca Rossini was brutally tortured in an Argentine military prison, and then nursed back to health by the beautiful Isabel. Exiled to Rome to avoid scandal, Rossini becomes a cardinal and the pope's confidante. He is admired and feared by his colleagues, for he understands the Church and speaks frankly. When the pope becomes gravely ill and a successor must be chosen, Rossini takes a central role. In the midst of the political intrigue that surrounds the selection of a new pope, Isabel arrives in Rome - along with Rossini's daughter.

In this inspiring autobiography, Morris West, aged 80, reviews the chronicle of his life and belief, offering a lyrical, intimate and affirming account of his pilgrimage as a 20th-century Christian. From the vantage point of his hard-won and deeply held faith, West shares a remarkable and moving journey, through doubting and questioning to ultimately embracing faith in God.

One of the most famous victims of the Holy Office of the Inquisition was the brilliant Dominican monk Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake for heresy in 1600. Morris West recreates a diary of Bruno’s intimate thoughts as he languishes in Rome’s worst prison for seven years. Bruno’s reflections and frank memories of his life reveal him to be both a fine thinker and a flawed priest - and a man willing to pay the highest price to be true to himself.