"We have before us the modern mind, intelligent, skeptical, ironical, splendidly trained for the great game of pretending that the world it comprehends in sterilized sobriety is the only and ultimate reality there is—yet a mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham." The German critic Erich Heller wrote those words with reference to Kafka, whose fiction shows both the necessity and the impossibility of religious faith, but they could also be applied to Brian Moore. In Cold Heaven, as in Catholics, as in The Mangan Inheritance, he takes seriously ideas and intuitions that we skeptical, ironical moderns are supposed to have passed beyond. He uses his intelligence to subvert our limited awareness of intelligence. (p. 15)

Moore is unafraid to use the devices and modes of a thriller in a novel intended as "serious" art. He is, after all, a former screenplay-writer for Alfred Hitchcock.

One...