Like Charles Dickens, the Australian novelist Morris West died suddenly at his desk, with an unfinished manuscript before him. The date was 8 October 1999; then in his eighty-fourth year, West had published twenty-six novels and two plays. His works had been translated into twenty-seven languages and had sold more than sixty million copies. His first best-seller (and the first book in the so-called Vatican trilogy), The Devil's Advocate (1959), presents the investigation by Blaise Meredith--on behalf of the Catholic Church--of the claims for beatification of an Italian partisan. With this book began four decades of popular success on a scale enjoyed by no other Australian novelist. It was not, however, often complemented by critical acclaim.

The book that West left unfinished at his death is, nonetheless, hardly incomplete. The Last Confession, published posthumously in 2000, is the story of Giordano Bruno, sixteenth-century Dominican priest, philosopher, and foremost martyr of the Renaissance...