The Bottom Line: A Vatican thriller with real nerve, driven by a sinister pope and a conspiracy of terrifying reach. Fans of Daniel Silva will find much to admire.
In Donald Anderson’s The Pope Must Die, the newly elevated Sixtus VI speaks with the ease of a man who knows his papacy has been engineered. In the opening pages, Anderson makes plain that the new American pope has not merely risen through charisma or providence. Cardinals have been paid off in exchange for their votes, and his ascent is entangled with outside money, political design and the quiet corruption of the conclave itself.
While that’s more than enough intrigue with which to fuel an average Vatican thriller, Anderson has something far more ambitious in mind. He soon reveals three parallel threats—a corrupt papal election, a covert nuclear plot and a public assassination in Rome – before gradually showing they are connected parts of the same conspiracy.
José Eusebio Barranca, a cardinal who serves as the Vatican’s Secretary of State, is soon sent through Rome on an errand for Sixtus. At Termini station, a stranger intercepts him and warns, “You mustn’t let them get to America,” before being fatally stabbed. We are also introduced to Amanda O’Brien, a CIA officer based in Rome under embassy cover. O’Brien is already tracking intelligence that radioactive material may be moving by sea through the Mediterranean toward the United States, while Jordan Harrison, a young FBI agent abruptly sent from Washington to Spain and folded into the operation, gives the novel a second perspective on how quickly a formal investigation can slide into something darker and less governed by rules.
While the book begins in Rome and Vatican City, the story soon extends its field of action to Spain, Sicily and Washington, D.C. The widening geography helps the novel shift from cloistered ecclesiastical intrigue to a broader thriller of shipping routes, intelligence work and nuclear jeopardy.
Sixtus VI is a memorable villain, but Amanda O’Brien is the novel’s most impressive character. Anderson gives her the particular authority of a professional who understands that ambiguity is part of the job. She knows how to pressure, how to withhold, how to read what others reveal in panic, vanity, or hesitation. There is no effort to soften her through sentimentality, nor to inflate her into myth. Instead Anderson builds her through competence, discipline, and a restless impatience with institutional delay.
Overall, Anderson understands that this kind of fiction depends on control, escalation and the careful placement of unease. He is strongest in rendering the machinery of conspiracy, even if the conspiratorial coalition’s ultimate political end-state remains somewhat murky. The result is a narrative that can accommodate large, even lurid premises while remaining grounded in scene-by-scene tension. Anderson is interested in titles, relics, diplomatic gestures, and public spectacle, but he is equally proficient in the minor details, such as manifests, handlers and the practical movement of contraband. Fans of Vatican thrillers have never read anything this expansive in the geopolitical sense, nor have they seen a pope this diabolical or dangerous.
