Maleficium

Martine Desjardins delivers to readers of Maleficium the unexpurgated revelations of Vicar Jerome Savoie, a heretic priest in nineteenth-century Montreal. Braving threats from the Catholic Church, Savoie violates the sanctity of the confessional in a confession-within-a-confession, in which seven penitents, each afficted with a debilitating malady or struck with a crippling deformity, relates his encounter with an enigmatic young woman whose lips bear a striking scar. As these men penetrate deep