A High profile pedophilia case involving a cardinal and the Church cover-up that follows. After you've finished the book go to: mosaicvirus.blogspot.com to read the research behind the story. Floricanto Press 2007. Purchase directly from me.
Nominated for a Stonewall Award by the American Library Association GLBT Round Table
It is 1983. In Rome, Cardinal Siri, the most powerful Cardinal in the Vatican, summons a young Jesuit priest and assigns him a grave and urgent task. The Vatican has been keeping secret an epidemic of deaths among priests in the northeastern United States. Father Javier Barraza must determine how and why they are dying—and whether a suspected international conspiracy against the Holy Roman Church is coming to fruition.
Barraza is an Argentinean who has risen swiftly through the ranks to the post of Devil's Advocate—an investigator of candidates for sainthood. In his new assignment, his path immediately intersects with Lillian Davis-Lodge, a special agent with the FBI, and a compelling figure from Barraza's past. The reappearance of Lillian is more than mere coincidence; she is far from the "special agent" she claims to be. She occupies the highest echelons of power in the United States, with full access to information and influence. Secrets and spies inhabit the subterranean world of the Church just as they do the government of the United States, and a disturbing trail of evidence strongly indicates to Barraza that his Church may be complicit in what he has been assigned to investigate.
A virus, man-made and swiftly lethal, has killed the priests, and a Cardinal in the United States is involved. As Barraza uncovers more about the role of his Church and the true origin of its laws about celibacy and its gay priests, he begins to fundamentally question his allegiance to Rome and to the doctrines of his faith. When he and Lillian find the creators of the virus, they find themselves in a desperate game of wits with faceless, mysterious, all-powerful institutions looking to protect their public image at all costs. Javier and Lillian are expendable, and even Lillian cannot protect them.
Set in the arcane, yet alluring world of the Vatican, The Mosaic Virus will grip you in its terrifyingly-true-to-life tale of secrets, sex and violence. At the end, you’ll pray that it’s only fiction. Carlos Mock’s maiden voyage proves he is already a master storyteller.
Laura S. Washington
Ida B. Wells-Barnett University Professor, DePaul University
Columnist, Chicago Sun-Times
Kudos for "The Mosaic Virus", March 9, 2007
Carlos Mock has crafted an extraordinary tale of international intrigue in the Tom Clancy tradition. Through a dark labyrinth of government, religion and medical research gone mad, he threads the powerful love story of a Latino Catholic priest and a woman intelligence operative. And Mock keeps you guessing and gasping right to the last paragraph. This book should definitely be a movie.
Patricia Nell Warren is author of THE FRONT RUNNER and other bestsellers
Reviewed by Tracy Baim - Copyright by The Windy City Times, January 10, 2007
Chicagoan Carlos T. Mock is a doctor and his new novel, The Mosaic Virus ( Floricanto Press, paperback, edited by Katherine V. Forrest ), makes full use of his medical background to create a tale of murder and intrigue during the early 1980s.
Mock, who is well-known as a supporter of GLBT, AIDS and Latino causes in Chicago, has set his newest book in the Vatican, the U.S., and Cape Town, South Africa, as he sends readers around the world in search of the cause of a mysterious virus killing priests—a virus that is strikingly similar to the new plague just being discovered among gay men in the U.S.
Jesuit Priest Javier Barraza is our hero, trying to fight against repressive Catholic ideas as well as his own longing for a childhood sweetheart--a woman now working for the FBI. The two met as teenagers in Argentina, and Special Agent Lillian Davis-Lodge has made sure she meets up with her friend again years later as they both search for the truth. The book is full of intricate medical details, but it is not too intense for someone who does not understand the inner workings of a virus. We follow Barraza and Davis-Lodge as they try to unravel an onion of power and deceit that goes all the way to the White House and the Pope--starting with World War II and ending in 1983. Mock has used actual history as a backdrop, adjusting timelines and some facts to fit his fictional story, but that does not take away from the mystery and suspense.
The Mosaic Virus works by presenting intriguing ideas that work precisely because they could be true. The best science fiction works when it is just one layer away from the reality we all think we know. And, in fact, there have been theories professed by activists that the HIV virus itself could have been a man-made virus that simply moved beyond its initial intended targets and use. Mock even involves former Nazi scientists living in Cape Town, experimenting with a new group of subjects, Blacks in Apartheid South Africa.
In the "real world" just this past weekend, the Vatican's pick for archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, resigned after admitting he had worked with the Polish Communist-era secret police, according to The New York Times. There are many empires of power Mock tackles in The Mosaic Virus, but despite so many conspiracy theories, Mock has managed to write an accessible story of a parallel universe that just might not be parallel after all.
Reviewed by Ken Furtato - Copyright by Echo Magazine - Phoenix, December 23, 2006.
If you like a thriller based on a conspiracy theory with global ramifications, put Carlos T. Mock's Mosaic Virus on your shopping list. Mock finds an ingenious way to connect the dots between real historical events and characters in a way that history (perhaps) never intended, coming up with a story both scary and plausible.
It's the early 1980s and priests in New York State are dying at an alarming rate, of a mysterious illness that kills quickly, yet baffles the medical community. The Vatican dispatches an investigator, "Father Doctor Javier Barraza the Jesuit" to determine if someone is killing priests and if there's a conspiracy afoot against the Church.
Two highly positioned Cardinals have competing agendas: one wants to learn the truth and one wants to hide it in order to protect the Church. Add a deadly FBI agent, Lillian Davis-Lodge — a female James Bond who is poised to become the next FBI Director and who had an adolescent romance with Barraza. The Vatican invites her assistance, but the FBI has its own agenda in preventing Barraza from accomplishing his mission.
As for those dots, they begin with Pope Pius XII, the Nazi regime, and a young Jew being protected from the Nazis by one of the Cardinals. That youth will one day become New York's Cardinal Spellman, whose sexual dalliances with under-aged boys were the tip of the iceberg of the Church's pedophile-priest scandals. Popes Pius XII and John Paul I figure prominently in the plot, as do the Church's sex scandals, homosexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, genocide, and even Gaëtan Dugas, once dubbed "patient zero" in the AIDS pandemic.
Mosaic Virus also hints at the shattering, sometimes crushing mystery and incomprehensibility of faith.
The Roman Catholic Church is a sacred cow that is always worthy of another skewer, and Mock delivers a potent one. In a world of wealth, power, secrecy and behind-the-scenes manipulation of global events, there's still no good-old-boys club like the Catholic Church.
Carlos Mock is a Chicago-based physician whose writing covers a broad spectrum of genres and topics. To learn more about him, visit his Web site at www.carlostmock.com.
OH ,SO VERY DARK AND DISTURBING......!!!!!!!,
Reviewer: Paul A. Minafri (Phoenix, Arizona) - From a reader at Amazon.com January 31, 2007
I stumbled across this title while reading one of the gay publications I receive. The premise intrigued me, so I immediately bought the book and put it at the top of my "to read" pile. COULDN'T PUT IT DOWN.!!! The working of the Vatican can always pique a curious mind's interest. The Church is so arcane, even to its clerical membership, that anything that probes at the fringes of the Church has to be interesting. Coupled with the vast intrigues of the United States government, the Iron Curtain nations, and dashes of history, this novel will chill and give pause to the reader. Take Aids, homosexuality, murder, sex, science, history, the integration of real life figures who are partially depicted accurately, and the subtle suggestion of eugenics and you have a story that will render you speechless. So well written was this book, that it gave me pause as to the possibility of the legitimacy of its assertions. It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction. You decide. THIS IS A MUST READ. I have decided to re-read this work, and document what I can as to the facts asserted by its author. His arguments will haunt you.
