The Odor of Sanctity

About the Book

A priest, Jewish convert, and practicing psychiatrist, Peter Albright is called to make Final Vows in the Jesuit Order. What happens when he learns his grandfather, murdered at Auschwitz, has left him a fortune in an anonymous, unnumbered Swiss account is the heart of this timely novel. Should Peter pursue his fortune and how? His major clues are the odors of scented stationery. His major complication is the perfume expert, a beautiful woman offering help, then falling in love.

Religious commitment and the lure of millions, romantic love and the call to priesthood all play out against the terrible odds of dead ancestors and the Holocaust remembered. The reader is drawn to these conflicts as though to fireworks where explosions displace one another, each more dazzling than the last. How Peter decides makes THE ODOR OF SANCTITY not only a suspenseful page-turner but a study in heroism.

About the Author

Joseph Roccasalvo followed his graduate degrees in Philosophy, English Literature, and Theology with a Harvard Ph.D. in Comparative Religion and a specialty in Buddhism. He has lived and taught in Boston, Bangkokm and Chicago. For ten years in New York City, he was a professor of religious studies at Fordham University's Bronx and Lincoln Center Campus. He was also visiting professor of Buddhism in Lugano, Switzerland. Now engaged in full-time teaching, he devotes himself to two alliterative loves: prose and pastoral work. A hospital chaplaincy and seven novels ensued: Fire in a Windless Place, Beyond the Pale, Chartreuse, Portrait of a Woman, The Devil's Interval, The Powers that Be, and the Odor of Sanctity. These were followed by two books of short stories, Outwards Signs and The Mansions of Limbo; a play, Waging Waugh, and a memoir, As It Were.