The Mark of Gnosis — Tom Kane

THE MARK OF GNOSIS is a murder mystery set in a Trappist Abbey in Wyoming. Mark Maguire, the investigating detective, is a former Catholic priest, turned atheist, who is undergoing a deep, spiritual change due to the deaths of his sister and his companion, Elizabeth, who died of breast cancer. While in the abbey, he encounters a saintly abbot, a monk possessed by a devil, a witty and eccentric exorcist, an exorcism in which a haunting sin of his youth is revealed and an evil monk who is a reincarnated Gnostic heretic from the fourth century who has formed a cabalah in the abbey with a small group of monks. The main plot focuses on the murder investigation and its solution but a subplot concerns Maguireâs intense spiritual journey back to God if not to the church. In conversations with the abbot, Maguire abandons his bitterness towards the church.