[In] The Cardinal Sins and now Thy Brother's Wife, the politics is as corrupt, the priests as troubled, the sex as overwritten, and the malarkey as uncut as you could wish. And, of course, since Greeley is a priest … the novels carry an added, albeit extraliterary thrill. A priest, after all, writing so frankly about ecclesiastical hypocrisy and about illicit sex? Writing, God help us, about sex as if it were fun? What must the world be coming to?

Well, rather less, actually, than Greeley himself seems to think. The big news that priests can be as horny as the rest of us should shock nobody…. His descriptions of political and churchly corruption are about as daring in their revelations as an average prime-time television series. And his espousal of a new, liberated Catholic theology turns out to be as inoffensive to conservatives, as basically old-fashioned and unadventurous...