Passion Play - Sean Stewart

Passion Play dates back to 1992, and is Sean Stewart's first novel. Stewart is perhaps best known for his contemporary fantasies Mockingbird and Galveston. Unlike the dreamlike lucidity of those novels, Stewart's prose here is spare and lean. Perhaps inspired by the rise of the Moral Majority during the elder Bush presidency, this is perhaps the most prescient vision of the extrapolation of the current Bush's administration since 1984.

The main character is Diane Fletcher, an empath who works as a freelance investigator for the police. In the future of Passion Play, the constitutional democracy of the United States is replaced with a fundamentalist Christian regime which treats sins as capital offences and televises executions. Fletcher is brought in to investigate the murder of the most popular actor in the state run entertainment industry, the de facto spokesman for the moral lifestyle of the patriotic citizen. Along the way, she discovers the hypocrisy of the powerful, the harsh faith of the true believer, the burden of the conflicted and compassionate, and the quiet rebellion of the rejected and outcast.

The mystery is a fairly straightforward parlor mystery with a narrow set of suspects, each reflecting an aspect of the dismal society they inhabit. However, it is Fletcher's ruminations on life and faith, enhanced by her empathy, that make the story worth reading as she struggles to find a place in an increasingly intolerant and rigid society. At fewer than 200 pages, there is scarcely a wasted word, and every scene is vivid and memorable, from the crime scene on the first page, to the final haunting execution as justice is finally served.

The book is currently in print from Tesseract Books, and it is about time that someone realized that the book perhaps even more current and essential today than it was when it was first published.