Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield

All signs point to the Devil having taken up residence in the business school at Boston College in this confounding mystery-adventure set on The Heights by BC English professor Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield.

Freshman Anna Starling has just come in from an early morning run in the spring of 2017. Her life as a college student is a whirling vortex in which she and her roommate, Lucy Pierre, struggle along with their friend group to balance difficult studies with demanding social lives on a campus that’s supposed to be a safe haven from the evils of life. But when Anna finds red and black stains on the bottom of her shoe, the red tests as human blood.

The blood belongs to the body of what turns out to be a dead theology professor that Anna has stumbled across on her run, but when she returns to look for it, it’s gone. So begins this psychological murder mystery in which Anna must confront for herself the central human problem of good and evil. At Jesuit BC, a loving and just God is trusted to separate good from evil. How then has evil crept in to this temple? On her quest to solve the murder mystery, Anna and her friend Josh challenge their moral beliefs while threading their way through a deepening underworld, in which good and evil overlap. Using her newfound knowledge of Gnosticism and her love of Gothic paradoxes, along with help from an eccentric, mysterious professor and his magical dog, Anna is intrepid in her pursuit of the truth.

As for the Devil himself threatening to set in motion diabolical schemes to sell the school’s soul for money, Anna and her friends are skeptical, for who really believes in an actual Devil in today’s computer-driven postmodern world? Yet the evidence is compelling, the unraveling of the mystery leading Anna and her coterie to an ultimate clash with the BC powers that be at the annual college bonfire.

Satanas Mysterium challenges its readers to wrestle with the problem of theodicy—how to reconcile an all-loving, all-powerful creator God with the undeniable reality of evil both within us and without. In the materialism of the 21st century in which notions of good and evil seem quaintly old-fashioned and hardly to be believed, this book speaks directly—and powerfully—to our fragmented lives. Are there moral absolutes, or was Nietzsche right and God is long dead? Anna is on a quest to find out, and her search takes her to the brink of a fiery pit.