This story, published in 2001, has Greeley's beloved sleuth and auxiliary bishop Blackie Ryan travelling from his home ground in Chicago to Paris where he investigates the disappearance of a young priest who has become popular and controversial as a student chaplain and television preacher.
Ryan takes on a young student, who he meets as a beggar, as assistant and interpreter. It turns out that this young woman and her boyfriend are talented interpreters of Celtic music, ans Greeley runs a sub-plot in which Ryan enlists various Irish-American contacts to bring them to America as musicians.
The main storyline has Ryan meeting with various characters to try to reconstruct the missing priest's life to find a motive for his disappearance - loss of faith, persecution by the hierarchy, disenchantment with celibacy all being suspected as playing a role. The inquisitorial mode allows Greeley to bring Ryan into dialogue with various fictional figures in the French church, and allows Greeley to carry on his lifetime project of friendly criticism of his own Church.
This book has all the familiar strengths and weaknesses of Greeley's work. He writes competently and economically. There is a puzzle, there are clues, and there is a solution. The story moves cleanly, without digressions. The characters sometimes come across as friendly caricatures of the characters found in the modern American Catholic Church, with a distinct preponderance of Chicago Irish in the mix. His stories are a platform for talking about an idealized version of the American Church in which the medieval clericalism of the Vatican is largely ignored by the faithful, who nevertheless remain faithful to a Catholic tradition and a Catholic vision of communion with God through communal worship in the Church (which differs from the Protestant perspective of an individual or personal communion with God through Bible study and personal prayer).
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