John Sack
makes his adult fiction debut with
The Franciscan Conspiracy, but he's no stranger to writing. In the 1980s he wrote a young adult historical fiction novel called
The Wolf in Winter about the life St. Francis. In addition, he's authored many computer books and worked as a technical writer and editor through his business, Cyberscribe.
Sack has spent a couple years studying at
Our Lady of Gethsemane, a Trappist monastery in
Kentucky . He later trained in Swami Muktananda’s Hindu ashram in
Ganeshpuri . Now in retirement, he continues to explore spiritual themes and fiction.
- You have referred to this book as a “medieval history mystery.” This isn’t a genre one sees often. How would you compare it to Name of the Rose or The Da Vinci Code in this respect?
This is a relatively new genre for novels. It was popularized—really in just the last few decades—by Ellis Peters, in her series of murder mysteries featuring the monk detective Brother Caedfil. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose also has a monk detective as its main character, whose task is to unravel a string of mysterious deaths at an Italian monastery. Both of these authors use fictional characters to solve fictional cases.
My novel, like theirs, has a medieval setting, but I base it on an actual event, the kidnapping and hiding of the remains of Saint Francis of Assisi at the instigation of the head of the Franciscan Order. The mystery in this book is not a murder, but the resolution of what appears to be a case of religious deception. It has this much in common with The DaVinci Code.
