Death Comes for the Archbishop

Published in 1927, this novel follows Jean Marie Latour, a French missionary priest sent as vicar apostolic to the newly American territory of New Mexico, and his friend Father Joseph Vaillant. Over decades they ride between Santa Fe, desert pueblos, isolated Mexican parishes, and mountain settlements, dealing with refractory clergy, Navajo and Pueblo communities, and the distance between Roman discipline and local custom. The book is arranged as a sequence of episodes rather than a single intrigue: conversions, buildings, journeys, and deaths accumulate. It is a historical novel about the planting of a diocese in a landscape older than the Church that claims it.

Bound in light brown cloth blocked with an image in grey and dark brown. Brown-orange endleaves. Brown-orange slipcase.