His Eminence, Cardinal Rossini, has risen from a rural pastor in Argentina to a confidant of the pontiff in Vatican City. His dramatic rise was a result of him being brutally assaulted and humiliated by the military in Argentina and saved by a wealthy landowner who bravely negotiated his release and exile to the Vatican. The landowner's married daughter, Isobel Ortega, nurses Rossini back to health and while tending his wounds they fall in love. This is a love which endures. The story takes place twenty years later.

The Pope has just died and private diaries of the pontiff are published, recording publicly his doubts and fears for the Church as it heads towards a new millenium, where churches continue to empty due to papal doctrine being "out of touch". Rossini's past comes to haunt him at this crucial time and the action becomes more and more tense, fraught with intrigue and razor-sharp diplomatic declarations of position.

The media attention is intense and intent on truth at all cost. Buried in the dialogue are all the questions facing the Church and its followers; celibacy, euthanasia, lack of warmth and heart, homosexuality, women in the church, conspiracy of silence, collusion with repressive governments, freedom of authentic expression of ideas, family obligations and abortion. The factions are the hard-line centralist conservatives or the open, heart-oriented liberals.

West weighs up all these issues and leads us to an emotional ending which purges and gives hope. This is a great story from a mature storyteller.