Joseph Roccasalvo

• May-2019
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Twists of Faith is a captivating title for stories of the spiritual life, a phrase that might conjure up people at odds with the world. But these tales are the stellar opposite. In a phrase, they're thrilling. These twenty-one action narratives, with...

• Aug-2017
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Alina in Ecstasy is a novel about a man who is a famous writer and intensely hostile to religion. Julian Mandel, more an agnostic than an atheist, is in a rage over a former lover's decision to join the Carthusians -- a religious order noted for sile...

• Mar-2016
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ISLAND OF THE ASSASSIN is about two kinds of silence in conflict. A covert killer, Kai Landrie, contracted by the CIA to target Islamic terrorists, develops moral scruples. He shares his doubts in confession with Peter Quince, a priest, who gets rend...

• Nov-2012
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The trio of stories in TRIPLE SEC is like the high alcoholic liqueur: a bitter-sweet extract of orange rind thrice distilled for intensity. In “The Vital Instinct,” Nick is in love with Laura who is losing her memory. He discovers that on...

• Jul-2010
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Dr. David McCauley, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical, revisits Thailand to study Buddhist forms of meditation in which all inflammatory mental conflicts cease. While in Bangkok, he meets again his former lover Maia, the beguiling Eurasian c...

• Mar-2010
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Harry MacPherson, an Episcopal priest and writer of thrillers, is approached for help by Mark Raven, whose marriage to Roselyn West Harry has celebrated over twenty years earlier.To discover the father shes never known, Cline Marquand, the daughter o...

• Mar-2010
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In Beyond the Pale, Nigel Swain, a gay Unitarian minister, is found dead in black pigskin, crushed by a garbage truck. His Boston friends: Clarissa, Mirabelle, Naomi, Roger, Penelope, and Bruno are determined to find the culprit. Their efforts are co...

• Mar-2010
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In BEYOND THE PALE, Nigel Swain, a gay Unitarian minister, is found dead in black pigskin, crushed by a garbage truck. His Boston friends: Clarissa, Mirabelle, Naomi, Roger, Penelope, and Bruno are determined to find the culprit. Their efforts are co...

• Mar-2010
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This is a collection of stories about people who are almost happy, stuck in a kind of beatitude that does not beatify. They seemed doomed to pursue happiness in marginal places only to find that bliss is doled out in measured amounts. Hankering for ...

• Apr-2009
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This collection of seven stories suggests that sacramental power can erupt in startling ways outside the normal context: a baptism conducted in the Gulf of Mexico by a crazed evangelical; a paralyzed skier who uses her handicap to dissuade from suici...

• Feb-2002
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Historically founded on a sixteenth century alchemist's elixir of long life (and the basis for the French liqueur), Chartreuse is a story of supernatural transformation; of the elixir's ingredients on which a Pope's life rests; of a young man's desti...

• Feb-2002
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A priest, Jewish convert, and practicing psychiatrist, Peter Albright, is called to make Final Vows in the Jesuit Order. What happens when he learns his grandfather, murdered at Auschwitz, has left him a fortune in an anonymous, unnumbered Swiss acco...

• Feb-2002
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Historically founded on the seventeenth century Stradivari family, PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN is a novel about Beatrice Stradivari, a young concert guitarist, and the two men who vie for her love; of an older Beatrice who, during World War II, rescues Itali...