Reviews for The second sleep : a novel

Publishers Weekly
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Thriller Award–winner Harris (Munich) does a masterly job playing with readers’ expectations in this mystery set in 15th-century England. Fr. Christopher Fairfax has been dispatched by his bishop to Wessex to officiate at the funeral of Fr. Thomas Lacy, a parish priest who died in a fall. The assignment seems routine enough, but on reaching the town of Addicott St. George, he finds unexpected questions to answer. When he visits Lacy’s library, he learns that the man he’s about to inter in consecrated ground possessed numerous heretical volumes relating to an antiquarian society proscribed by the church. Eager to keep things uncomplicated, Fairfax proceeds with the funeral service as if he’d never seen the books, only to have the rites disrupted by an attendee who yells that Lacy’s death was not the result of “evil chance.” When foul weather delays Fairfax’s departure, he finds even more oddities, including the disappearance of the church register and an unsettling letter by a Cambridge professor found in a mass grave, which supports his suspicion that Lacy’s interest in the past was more than innocent scholarly curiosity. Few readers will pick up on the fairly planted clues. This is a clever complement to Harris’s debut mystery, Fatherland. 75,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Nov.)


Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

In Wessex, England, ""the year of our Risen Lord 1468,"" Father Thomas Lacy takes a deadly fall from the Devil's Chair, a mysterious ruin left by heretical ancients. Dispatched to tend to Lacy's burial, young priest Christopher Fairfax must extend his stay in the remote village after debris from a storm obstructs roads. Fairfax sees it as a sign from God; he discovered an illegal set of The Proceedings and Papers of the Society of Antiquaries in Father Lacy's library and is torn between obedience and the desire to investigate Lacy's heresy. Lacy's library reveals a shocking contradiction to the church's teachings that the ancients were eliminated by an apocalypse meant to punish their idolatrous craving of scientific knowledge. Lacy hid a letter from Dr. Peter Morgenstern, an ancient physicist who predicted technology's role in modern society's demise and hinted at a plan for preserving advanced scientific knowledge. As Fairfax begins to question orthodoxy, so does the reader: Is this an alternative history set in the future, not the past? Fairfax, clearly a better detective than a pastor, finds fellow questioners in Lady Sarah Durston, Captain Hancock, and a pair of heretical antiquarians. Fueled by mounting evidence that Morgenstern's stash of ancient technology is buried at the Devil's Chair, they develop a plan to excavate right under the church's authoritarian nose. Set against a neo-Dark Ages England, Fairfax's innocent truth-seeking is a thought-provoking lens through which to view this tale of murder and obsession. Strongly recommended for book groups.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This could be Harris' biggest hit since Fatherland (1992); film rights have already been sold for a multipart TV series.--Christine Tran Copyright 2019 Booklist


Library Journal
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From Fatherland to the "Cicero" trilogy, the internationally best-selling Harris ranges far, here landing in 1468 England. Having traveled to a bleak Exmoor village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor, fresh-faced priest Christopher Fairfax wonders at the man's obsession with the past—he'd hoarded ancient coins, bits of glass, even human bones—and whether that obsession precipitated his death. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

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