Perky, pretty Sister Angela, formerly Gayle Flynn, is found hemorrhaging at her Minnesota convent and is rushed to the hospital (''Something-someone-had ripped this woman open from the vagina to the rectum'') and when the doctors discover clear evidence of a recent birth, the mortified nuns search the convent, finding the gagged-to-death infant (his mouth stuffed with a nightgown) behind a bookcase. Rose covent was located and Sister Angela herself, whose tortured mind was wiped of all memory of the incident when she was pulled back to life in the hospital-and who insisted even through the ensuing trial that she was not guilty of murder.Presumably inspired (if that's the word) by a recent real-life case, Breslin has stretched a National Enquirer headline-Nun Murders Newborn Baby-into 600 talky, overwrought pages of ghoulish police-procedural, humdrum courtroom drama, sleazy sex survey, and half-baked psychopathology. Paul Eagle-Bulletin, who sensed in Sister Angela's story the key to her own sexual chaos Tim Vance, chief of detectives in the sleepy suburb of Cambridgeport, where the St. Among the dozen searchers involved in this case, three were clearly obsessed with finding the truth of it: Meg Gavin, a thirty-six-year-old convent-school-reared reporter assigned to cover the case for the St. So began the investigation into the murder of Baby Boy Flynn.

They found the boy child, finally, upside down in a green straw wastebasket behind a bookcase in Sister Angela's room, a pink nightgown wrapped around his neck and a pair of white panties crammed into his mouth. Keith Talbott, the chief gynecologist, sent two of the nuns, who had accompanied Sister Angela to the hospital, to search for the infant she must have delivered that afternoon. The next was why this attractive thirty-three-year-old nun, principal of the Benedictine Kindergarten School, had virtually bled to death on the floor of her room in the St. When Sister Angela Flynn was rushed into the emergency room of Parkhurst General Hospital with no pulse and no blood pressure, the first, immediate question was whether she could be yanked back from the brink of death.

The dustcover is showing some wear, some tiny tears at the top and bottom of the spine but the book itself is in excellent condition.

This is a very large hardback (620 pages). The listing, Unholy Child, A Novel by Catherine Breslin has ended.

Unholy Child by Catherine Breslin