Fiction

A Hoarse Half-Human Cheer: An Entertainment
X. J. Kennedy

Curtis Brown Unlimited, publisher

Available from Amazon.com
paperback $14.49
Kindle e-book $5.99

In this sinister comedy, the mob blackmails a pedophile priest in order to take over his lucrative charity, The Children’s Crusade. Events follow fast: a car-bombing, a fiery holocaust, an exorcism that ends in terror, a raid on a brothel, a college commencement that turns into a shootout, a championship basketball game in which rival gamblers have bribed both teams. Alternately tense and hilarious, this is a story full of sudden twists. Devotees of the thrillers of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, and Janet Evanovich will find it in the same league.

The story begins in September 1946, and Kennedy notes, “That was when I started college myself. I went to a school, nowadays a distinguished university, which at the time, like my fictitious College of St. Cassian of Imola’s, was undergoing terrible growing pains. To make matters worse, it was being used by the Mafia as a front for a racket, and in my senior year the campus was raided by the FBI.