SACRIFICE is the third of Clyde Phillips's novels to feature San Francisco Police Inspector Jane Candiotti. SACRIFICE is a study in contrast: it begins with the murder of Philip Iverson, a man wealthy almost beyond imagining, on the most gratifying night of his life. It is followed closely by the murder of Willie Temple, a man whose life has been on a downward spiral for decades. Candiotti's homicide team --- a team that includes her husband, detective Kenny Marks --- is assigned to both homicides. Iverson's murder is given the expected priority, yet Candiotti, despite pressure from the mayor on down, refuses to simply neglect Temple's murder, even when there is subtle pressure to do so. As the murders of both of these very different men are investigated, it is slowly but painstakingly determined that neither their lives nor their deaths are quite what they seemed to be.

Candiotti's team, through good, old-fashioned police work, also discovers the tenuous, random connection between the men that resulted in the death of one of them, a discovery that places Candiotti in life-threatening danger from two wholly unexpected sources. Phillips plays the story out against the stark backdrop of a city that suffers from a slow internal decay, while nonetheless maintaining an external beauty and keeping the reader on a roller coaster ride of suspense. Phillips also continues to develop the characters, and relationship, of Candiotti and Marks. Their professional and personal relationships do not always mesh well --- Nick and Nora, they're not --- but Phillips infuses them with a willingness to make things work that is at once refreshing and realistic.

SACRIFICE continues the tradition that began with FALL FROM GRACE and BLINDSIDED, while furthering the development and evolution of Candiotti and Marks. Phillips's ability and inclination to keep his characters fresh and yet familiar bodes well for future volumes of this series --- and for Phillips's growing number of readers. Recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

In Clyde Phillip's latest police thriller, "Sacrifice," he treats his readers to another heart-stopping adventure that will keep you planted to your seat until the very last page.

Philip Iverson, San Francisco's favorite son, had just donated millions to his favorite cause and had quite a bit of cash and expensive jewelry on him when he was gunned down in a hotel parking garage. Yet he had not been robbed. Could it be that Iverson might not be the good guy that everyone thought he was, and what was in his past that could provoke someone to kill him?

Willie Temple was a down and out drifter who showed up at big events to panhandle from the rich. He was stabbed to death on a Pier not far from where Iverson was murdered. But symbols and clues left at Temple's death spoke of a different scenario than that of Iverson's. What had Willie Temple seen that he shouldn't have?

Lieutenant Jane Candiotti, head of the SFPD Homicide division and her team, which includes her new husband Inspector Kenny Marks and an enthusiastic but bumbling new detective Linda French, is called in to investigate the crimes.

When other victims start piling up with eerily similar evidence, the mystery deepens. One mystifying clue keeps popping up over and over - the mark of an "S" drawn in the victims' blood appears at each murder. The police fear that there is a serial killer on the loose. It falls upon Jane and her team to pull together the pieces of the puzzle to uncover the plots behind the murders before someone else winds up sacrificed.

Clyde Phillips is a master of storytelling. His years of experience as a television producer and writer serve him well in his role as a novelist. His dialogue is snappy and fast and his stories move with grace and speed. "Sacrifice" is the third in Phillips' "Jane Candiotti" novels (the first two are "Fall From Grace" and "Blindsided"), and they are all equally well-written, high-voltage tales that will leave you breathless and wanting more.

Watch for more of Clyde Phillips' fast-paced, amazing writing skills as he takes the reins of head writer for the highly successful crime NBC crime series "Boomtown" this fall.
As I have said before, "Clyde, write faster!" I can't wait for the next installment of the Jane Candiotti series.

Sharon Galligar Chance
TIMES RECORD NEWS - Wichita Falls, Texas

The only slight problem with this book is that it does hold a very obvious Christian bias. I was not aware that this book fell into the genre of "Christian fiction" when I bought it. Although the plot is great and the story is very entertaining, it is obvious to me that the authors intend to bring a stong faith element to the story. I wish the authors had broken out of their Christian bias long enough to simply tell a good story.

However, in spite of the Christian bias to the story, I will still complete all six books in this series. This is a great tribute to the authors, because in spite of the fact that they have introduced a bias that I personally do not agree with, the story is still worth reading to the end.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is up for a great story, with heartfelt emotion and great humor.

As Nick grows to adulthood and beyond, he holds out hope that Julia will eventually be his. But *maybe later* moves further and further away: "I'd chosen as my heart's desire the queen of the inaccessible," he says. Unaware of her continuing hold on Nick's heart, Julia flits in and out of the rest of Max Phillips's accomplished debut novel, which strings us along - through three decades! - in the hopes that she and Nick (the book's narrator) will finally consummate their sporadically torrid relationship. And even though "Snakebite Sonnet" begins to fade about halfway through, we never stop caring about these characters, or about Nick's struggle to reconcile each new romantic liaison with the unfulfilled promise of Julia's blood.

"Snakebite Sonnet" is marvelous in tracing the young Nick's immature thoughts and feelings. Phillips perfectly captures the appealingly peculiar Wertheim family, headed by eccentric pre-hippie parents who insist Nicky and his twin sister Del call them by their first names (instead of their "societal roles"). "I called our folks Mom and Dad, against their wishes, because I loved them and wanted them to act like parents," he tells us. "Del called them Saul and Suzanne because she hated them and had given up." Describing his parents' going about the house ! nearly nude, and his experimental necking with his sister, Nicky notes: "I didn't know what the routine was in other families, but I figured it wasn't like this." There's also a ton of (non-familial) sex in "Snakebite Sonnet," to the extent that it seems a bit out of proportion to the rest of Nick's life. On the other hand, Phillips writes a great sex scene, so we don't mind that this story about thwarted passion is so erotically charged. The novel is frequently very funny, as when Nick and a girlfriend tearfully break up: "After that, we went through a phase where we dated all the time, and then a phase where we went to bed occasionally and tried to see ourselves as friends, and finally a phase where she married a forty-two-year-old public relations consultant."

After a while - about the point when Nick turns 23 and moves to Manhattan's East Village, working/killing time as a bike messenger - the humor, and everything else, turns a bit desperate. As a full-fledged adult, Nick isn't nearly as fun to spend time with. And he's not all that familiar anymore. Unfortunately, many decades-spanning chronicles of lives fall victim to the same tendencies: At some point the protagonist stops seeming charmingly eccentric and countercultural and begins to come off as antisocial, unstable and inconsistent. What was precocious becomes merely precious. Sometimes the inconsistencies make it tough to get a handle on Nick. "What do you believe in?" a girlfriend asks him at age 21. "Passion," he responds. But two years later, participating in an avant-garde art show, he agrees to lie in a corner "completely mummified in masking tape." A collaborator says, "It's *got* to be you, Nick. No one else is passive enough." Which is it? Passion or passivity?

Meanwhile, in her every-so-often appearances, each of which discombobulates Nick, Julia loses all her mystery and most of her appeal. "She's grown genuinely nasty," one woman tells him. Julia's flaws and quirks start seeming pathological; her drinking and behavior turn ugly, ! and less and less forgivable. In the grip of permanent obsession, Nick too becomes less sympathetic, particularly in the area of romance. He says of one girlfriend: "I'd learned to experience desire as hatred. . . . I'd come to view sex as a long-deferred retribution for life's teasing. . . . I was rough, and loved to inflict pleasure, to bite and slap and wrench her from one posture to another. . . . The real me . . . was spelled out in bruises and toothmarks." After that disturbing relationship ends, with relief on our parts, Nick's life slows to a near stop. "I turned thirty, then thirty-one." Phillips even acknowledges the difficulty of moving a story along against a protagonist's inertia. "Now, a story, as I understand it, is a matter of What Does Our Hero Do Next?" he writes. "The difficulty in telling the story of a cement-assed depressive like me is that our hero does *nothing* next, and does it over and over."

Nick finally forces himself to come to terms with his elusive goddess, now plump and heading toward middle age but still unheedingly hovering over his every move. "She's poisoning everything," he cries out to an old friend. "She's hurt me so much! I don't care if she didn't mean to, I don't care if I sat up and begged for it! I'm choking on this backlog of things I haven't said." The inevitable final, air-clearing meeting is worth waiting for, and we find ourselves liking Nick and Julia a little again. And it turns out that, despite the flaws of "Snakebite Sonnet," it has kept us entertained and focused all the way to the end.

Knowing nothing about this book,I picked it up and read the first page. It is love novel. It's hard not to laugh. This is a novel that should recieve serious attention. Well done Mr Phillips, keep writing and I'll keep reading.

The one drawback is that the 1998 publication date makes this book not very useful in information on new hotels, restaurants or prices. For example, there was nothing about the relatively new "Vodka Museum" which is near St. Isaac's cathedral, where my friends and I had a fun visit.

Compare guidebooks and I think you will see that this one is by far the best for detail, pictures and general information.

Highly recommended.

As other reviewers have noted, this book is ideal to use to review with a tour guide the sights and areas that you want to see because of its diagrams, pictures and suggested itineraries.

It is also ideal for the cruise ship visitors who will be in St. Petersburg for less than three days, as the photos give a good appreciation to the visitor of what there is to see, especially in a limited amount of time.

The history and art sections are reasonably good for a guide book.

The restaurant and hotel suggestions are a bit stale, and the pricing is out of date (although the range of pricing is still reasonably accurate).

Overall I liked the first volume, but as a history of the church it has too many weaknesses to earn a high rating. First of all, Schaff was too much of a Christian to write dispassionately. The book often lapses into what is closer to apologetics than to history, and at times you can almost see him holding his nose when he has to write about (ugh!) pagans. Even more objectionable in my opinion is the presence of numerous passages such as the following:

"As religion is the deepest and holiest concern of man, the entrance of the Christian religion into history is the most momentous of all events. [...] Jesus Christ, the God-Man, the prophet, priest, and king of mankind, is, in fact, the centre and turning-point not only of chronology, but of all history, and the key to all its mysteries. Around him, as the sun of the moral universe, revolve at their several distances, all nations and all important events, in the religious life of the world; and all must, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, contribute to glorify his name and advance his cause." (pp. 56-57)

This is a panegyric on the Christian religion, not history. And yet Schaff tells us that "The historian must first lay aside all prejudice and party zeal ..." (p. 25)

Another drawback of this work is its age: it dates from about 1900. Age is not an issue in some forms of writing, but it is felt in this case. For example, Schaff tries to refute a date of 170 AD for the composition of John's Gospel, as was maintained by the Tubingen school in Germany. Decades after Schaff died, it was noticed that a papyrus fragment dating from the first half of the second century in fact contains a few partial verses of John, proving that the 170 AD date is untenable (see Bruce Metzger, "The Text of the New Testament"). Thus, although events proved Schaff correct in his judgment, someone reading only this book would be unaware of the most persuasive piece of evidence. Also, the bibliographic references, which Schaff clearly labored so hard on, are of course over a century old.

In summary, this work shows its age and is often tendentious. However, the reader can find in these volumes a treatment of almost every main personage and significant event in the history of the Christian church.

This book covers the main areas pretty well but I think left out other areas that could cause potential problems if not discussed. A more comprehensive book is 1000 Questions for Couples. I think it can only be gotten at questionsforcouples. com