Hansjörg Schertenleib Die Namenlosen (The Nameless Ones) Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, February 2000, 320pp. ISBN 3 462 02893 6 This novel is a real page-turner. The tone is sinister, since the obsessions and aims of a weird religious sect are at its heart. Its central character is a woman called Christa Notter, who tells her own story as she sits in a cottage in Ireland awaiting retribution, and almost certain death, from the nastily named but charismatic Fisnish, head of a cult (The Nameless Ones, as they call themselves) bent on wreaking revenge on Catholic priests and nuns. Christa has already accompanied one cult member while he tortured and killed a Catholic priest - an episode described in full-blooded, sadistic detail. But later she has baulked at the mission assigned to herself - that of acting as a human suicide bomb and blowing up the Pope. She indeed has her reasons, as have other members of the cult, for resentment against particular Catholics. Her narrow-minded mother forbade her all natural frivolities and was personally responsible for her misfortunes to the extent that she entrusted her, while still in her teens, to the care of a perverted priest and through him to his curate, by whom she had a child. It is this child, removed from her at birth, for whom she is writing her 'confession'. Psychologically, the picture of the sect and its leader is fascinating. Total obedience is what the demented Fisnish demands, coupled with punitive fasting and self-denial. One of the members is cold-bloodedly murdered when he fails to stand the pace. Christa, like the others, is branded on the sole of her left foot, then sent off with instructions to spend thirty days alone - a parody, like the rest of the cult's practices, of the religion its members hate. This is a very impressively constructed book. If we know at the start that the Pope will not be assassinated, we knew the same thing about general de Gaulle at the start of The Day of the Jackal. In both cases we are gripped throughout.