The Third Secret

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Set in the near future Secret introduces Jakob Volkner--Pope Clement XV--a German "caretaker pope" who nearing the age of 80 was elected as John Paul II's successor. But three years into his papacy the thoughtful Clement has begun to quietly express skepticism about papal infallibility and the Church's restrictive dogma and to make odd requests of his longtime secretary Monsignor Colin Michener an Irish-born but American-reared priest whose vows of celibacy have been tested--and found wanting. Clement has also made repeated visits to a guarded sanctum within the Vatican archives where sacred and historic documents are stored. And he's dispatched Michener to Romania to locate an elderly cleric who in the 1950s translated three cryptic prophecies purportedly offered by the Virgin Mary in 1917 to a trio of children in Fatima Portugal. Those secrets have since been fully disclosed to the world. Or have they? That's the question facing Michener in the wake of Clement's shocking suicide as he pursues a twisted trail of clues crimes and religious forecasts from Rome to Bosnia to Germany accompanied by his former lover journalist Katerina Lew. But making any additional secrets known to the world will put Michener in confrontation with doctrinal reactionaries led by Cardinal Alberto Valendrea the Vatican's Italian secretary of state who's determined to follow Clement as the Vicar of Christ--even if that requires inventing a few new sins and flouting a 900-year-old prediction of doom for the next pope.