William X. Kienzle is an American author best known for the Father Koesler Series, a series of highly popular mystery thrillers. Kienzle first started out as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church where he served for over two decades as a parish priest. Even as a priest, he was involved with writing as the editor in chief of the Michigan Catholic, the archdiocese’s newspapers. His work with the paper earned him a Catholic Press Association acknowledgement for excellence in editorial writing and a general excellence award in Journalism from the Michigan Knights of Columbus. He would leave the priesthood in 1974 after he became increasingly frustrated with canonical law that would not allow him to remarry divorcees. Kienzle’s first ever-published …show more content…
Koesler is a chain smoking personable sleuth that helps the police solve a variety of mysterious murders that occur in his parish. Given Kienzle’s background as a parish priest, many of the novels are written from the perspectives of a priest, especially his experiences with the church. As such, most of the novels are a critique of the canonical rules of the Catholic Church in narratives that may be deemed to be half-amateur sleuth, and half police procedurals. Even as the novels are first of all thrillers, there is a deeper meaning to William Kienzle’s whodunits, which make them more of moral plays rather than your classic mystery. For instance, Father Koesler is a heavy drinker and smoker and is the perfect example of the wide gulf not only between the ordinary people and the priests but also between priest and the nuns. The novels offer some great insights into the daily routines of nuns and priests, including a peek into the sacred rituals of the church, particularly the concept of confession. What is even more interesting is the authors take on differences in opinion among parishioners, nuns, and priest on issues of canon such as the rules of Vatican Two. All of these take place alongside thrilling narratives of journalists, cops, and Detroit clergymen having to deal with abortion, black magic, drug peddling prostitution, extortion, and
He interviews people such as George Saunders, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and several more well-known experts about topics ranging from books to music to the theory of gravity. These interviews give the points Klosterman is making credibility as he jumps from topic to topic. He also cites historical examples of the future being completely unpredictable during the present; for example, the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville went from being a total flop at the time of publishing to being known as the greatest novel of all time. Nothing in Melville’s time indicated the success of that book, and there is no particular reason that the order of events couldn’t have led to another unknown brilliant novel’s success. While citing these historical examples and interviews with great thinkers, Klosterman maintains a conversational, humorous, and engaging tone that keeps the reader wanting more. There were times where I found myself laughing out loud while reading, a very rare occurrence for me. One of my favorite lines in the book was when Klosterman was speaking about how people’s perceptions of presidents change over time. He writes about how the “worst US president of all-time” has changed throughout the years from Grant while he was in college to Buchanan. Along with this,
The Pacific coast port city of San Francisco, California provides a distinctively mysterious backdrop in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Unlike many other detective stories that are anchored in well-known metropolises such as Los Angeles or New York City, Hammett opted to place the events of his text in the lesser-known, yet similarly exotic cultural confines of San Francisco. Hammett used his own intricate knowledge of the San Francisco Bay Area - coupled with details collected during a stint as a detective for the now defunct Pinkerton Agency - to craft a distinctive brand of detective fiction that thrived on such an original setting (Paul 93). By examining the setting of 1920’s San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon, it becomes apparent that one of Hammett’s literary strengths was his exceptional ability to intertwine non-fictional places with a fictional plot and characters in order to produce a logical and exceedingly believable detective mystery.
There is something very interesting about a book with a cover promising lurid tales of sex, drugs, and cheap labor. The persona of Eric Schlosser's subject and the effective marketing behind it are very verbose in nature.
One of the most enjoyable points that Jenkins has done within the book was that he posed questions. The reader would be very engaged in the book and the Jenkins would pose questions that would cause the reader to stop and ponder for a moment. Jenkins had questions such as “Are these people “really” Catholic?” Page 132 (Digital Download Book). This was a question he asked because many Americans consider themselves to be Christian, but deny the church on certain points. They reject some of the doctrines that the church preaches, but yet they mark themselves off as Christians. The reader can have a different answer to the question, Jenkins simply states “For present purposes, my view is that if they consider themselves Catholic, then that is what they are.” Page 132 (Digital Download
Woolrich reinforced the detective fictions of yesterday, introducing to the American audience new detectives, who not only wheels a gun but also uses their knowledge of psychoanalysis to catch the perpetrator and solve the crime. Though Woolrich extends his knowledge of the human mind, he, just like MacDonald, Chandler and Hammett gives reference to 18th-century authors which include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe.
Richard Kuklinski was born on April 11, 1935 in the projects of Jersey City, New Jersey to Stanley and Anna Kuklinski. His father was a brakesman who often came home drunk and beat on his wife and kids. His mother worked at a meat processing plant who also beat on her children. Richard was the second of four children. His siblings faced much abuse from both of their parents. His mother was a devout catholic and believed that the best parenting style is strict catholic faith with strict discipline. She often beat her kids with broomsticks and other household items. This constant abuse fueled hate against both of his parents. Stanley and Anna’s abuse was so harsh that when Richard was five years old, his brother Florian, was physically beaten to death. His parents covered up the murder by telling the local police their child fell down a flight of stairs.
Griffin explores Heinrich Himmler and the secrets that are hidden within him. Throughout his childhood Himmler’s secrets and thoughts were hidden, overshadowed by a mask or barrier formed by his upbringing and culture.
...ther than reciting facts of the documentation, he makes the city of Chicago come alive in a way that many could not accomplish. Throughout the book it was told with abundant cross-cutting and foreshadowing. It wasn’t until after the fair when people began to realize just how many people have simply vanished during the fair. The numbers were astounding. The big question was, were the missing people during that time connected with Dr. Holmes and his killings. Many people assumed it was him because this man was a serial killer with epic proportions. After years have passed, a detective was given the assignment to uncover the truth behind Holmes and what motivated him and his psychopathic mind. The information he found was shocking. In the end it seems to tell a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.
This is the first threshold that Cohle crosses on his adventure. He and his partner find the church and a key piece of evidence linking it to the killer they are searching for. This first accomplishment in finding a piece of evidence signifies to the detectives, just as much as the viewer, that the case is progressing.
The structural and technical features of the story point towards a religious epiphany. The title of the story, as well as its eventual subject, that of cathedrals, points inevitably towards divinity. Upon first approaching the story, without reading the first word of the first paragraph, one is already forced into thinking about a religious image. In addition, four of the story’s eleven pages (that amounts to one third of the tale) surround the subject of cathedrals.
Michael Kroenenwetter was an author who was rather educated in the type of works he published. Kroenenwetter continued his studies after high school at the University of Wisconsin. Here, he accomplished numerous goals. Aside from being an author, he was a former Columnist of City Pages, a member of Mystery Writers of America, Crime Writers of Canada, and Author’s Guild. Kroenenwetter was the founder of Joyce and Company Stage Troupe, and a recipient of St. Martin’s Press/Private Eye Writer’s Best first Private Eye Novel Award. He wrote over twenty nine other works besides Capital Punishment, which all relate to politics or the history of American’s criminal justice system. Michael is credited for being the author of the first edition of ABC-CLIO’s Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Social Issues (Death penalty," 2010).
Edgar Allen Poe’s tale of murder and revenge, “The Cask of Amontillado”, offers a unique perspective into the mind of a deranged murderer. The effectiveness of the story is largely due to its first person point of view, which allows the reader a deeper involvement into the thoughts and motivations of the protagonist, Montresor. The first person narration results in an unbalanced viewpoint on the central conflict of the story, man versus man, because the reader knows very little about the thoughts of the antagonist, Fortunato. The setting of “The Cask of Amontillado”, in the dark catacombs of Montresor’s wine cellar, contributes to the story’s theme that some people will go to great lengths to fanatically defend their honor.
Throughout his article, Finkel uses dialog between him and Knight to support the claim that the so called hermit, Christopher Knight, is benevolent, only doing what he thought he needed to do to survive: “‘My heart rate was soaring. It was not a comfortable act. I took no pleasure in it, none at all, and I wanted it over as quickly as possible’”. By sharing the thoughts and feelings Knight had while committing the crimes that kept him living, Finkel is intentionally shaping the readers opinions by pushing the them to sympathize with Knight and his situation. This, in turn, minimizes the felonies he committed in the eyes of the reader. In addition, these samples of limited dialog that were recorded of Knight
The Outsider, written by Albert Camus, and The Trial, written by Franz Kafka, are two books that have been critically acclaimed since the time that they were published. There are critics that claim that The Outsider is a dull book, and is not even a read-worthy book. Other people claim that it shows us how society actually acts upon people who do not want to be like the rest of society. The Trial falls under the same kind of criticism; but both books, although written by different writers in a different époque, fall under the same kind of genre: Imprisoned Lives. In both The Outsider and The Trial there are many people who influence the protagonists in a positive and in a negative way, but none of those characters are as important as the priest. The priest, being of the same profession in both books and trying to accomplish the same kind of tasks, have a totally different effect on the two protagonists. In The Outsider the priest changes the whole attitude that Meursault has to life, whereas in The Trial the priest tells Joseph K. how his life actually is.
As the story picks up one is with professor Landon introduced to a vast conspiracy seemingly connected to Dante Alighieri’s 14th century masterwork, Dante’s Inferno, spanning some of the antiques finest cities and helmed by a shadowy figure donning a plague mask declaiming the ailments of the ‘decease called mankind’ upon the earth. The central story, with its many twists and turns, is through a myriad of vivid and detailed descriptions of both places, people and proceedings made wholly immersible. In his titular fashion of mysteries and revelations, the author leads one from mystery to mystery, each answer provoking another question and each revelation more profound than the last; further adding to the immersion by steadily keeping the readers focused and attentive. Even though the enjoyment of the story itself is solely subjective its dramaturgical structure, authentic settings and discovery-based narrative evokes within the reader an air of