Angel's Passage — John Sack

On the nights of the full moon, fra Angelo Lorenzini crawls into the darkest part of his dungeon and pulls his blanket over him. He stays away from stray moonbeams, those stairways to the edge of his senses that start his skin prickling and the blood raging through his veins. He lifts his ears to better hear the howling of the moon, but is careful not to reply. Angelo bears the mark of the wolf. Since the discovery of this strange inheritance from his grandfather, he has sought the reason for the curse -- why was he singled out? His search leads him on a long and tortuous spiritual pilgrimage. In contrast to the legendary King Midas, he destroys everything and everyone he touches, including the two women he truly loves. His soul is divided, torn among his human, animal and angelic natures. The novel is set against the backdrop of 13th-century Italy, a period profoundly tarnished by conflicts between ecclesiastical and imperial powers, a time when the extreme poverty of religious zealots challenged the prosperity of merchants, monastic orders, and high church officials. Angelo's personal feud with pope Boniface VIII goes back fifty years to their childhoods, when the pope was the boy Benedetto Gaetani. Angel's Passage is a companion work to the international best-seller, The Franciscan Conspiracy (translated as: Im Zeichen der Serafim, La Conspiracion de Assis, Le Complot des Franciscains, Il Sigillo di Dio).