16 June 2026

Today, my new novel, The Acolyte, releases on Amazon. Available as a Kindle e-book or paperback. An Audible audiobook is in the works. The Acolyte also participates in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program.

Faith moves mountains, but trembles before the face of evil.

Hank is thirteen, head altar boy at a traditional Catholic parish, and devoted to three things: the Church, his brotherhood of altar boys, and Nora, whose father is the archbishop's lawyer. When the FBI raids the cathedral and seizes evidence, they need Hank. So does the Church, for opposite reasons.

Caught between Adrienne, a young federal prosecutor building a case against a cybercrime network, and an institution that demands his silence, Hank goes looking for the truth in the catacombs beneath the cathedral. What he finds shakes his faith in everything but his true love.

In The Acolyte, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Richard Dooling tells a dark, funny, and fearless story about innocence, holiness, romantic love, and the nature of evil.

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Read A Sample

You can read a free sample at Amazon, or I’ve included an edited passage below.

Hank is quite proud because he has just been named head altar boy. He is still in his cassock and surplice, fresh from serving Mass and putting out the candles with his candlelighter, when he finds his girlfriend, Nora, waiting for him just outside the gates to the Lash Chapel crypt:

I Want To See The Weeping Angel

They were so close to the gated entrance to the crypt, that Hank could feel the cool air creeping up the open stairwell.

They leaned against the heavy brass gate and almost fell on top of each other, when the gate moved and gave against their weight. Hank stumbled and caught Nora in his arms. The ponderous brass gate swung open in slow motion and struck the door stop with a single soft bong.

Hank caught his breath and peered down the dark circular stairwell to the Lash Chapel crypt. He felt a draft press against his face like a cold November fog. The sweat he and Nora had worked up now chilled him to his bones and made him shiver in his cassock. Never in almost three years as an altar boy had Hank found this gate open.

They could run, but that would expose them to the security cameras and make them look guilty—Of what? They weren't doing anything wrong. Sure they were boyfriend and girlfriend, and everybody knew it, but they had their clothes on, and they weren't skipping school or vaping weed.

Nora tiptoed back to the nave and hid behind a pillar. She leaned out into the side aisle and checked both ways for witnesses. She crept back to the open gate and stood close to Hank. "Nobody." She smiled. "Just us."

Nora went to the top of the stairs and peered down into the darkness. She glanced back at Hank.

"Let's go," she whispered. "I want to see the weeping angel."

"The gate's open," whispered Hank. "What if somebody is down there?"

Nora shrugged and rolled her eyes, like she'd figure that out if and when. She looked at Hank and waited, and the expression on her face said, Don't tell me you're afraid of a crypt?

Hank followed her through the gate into the shadows. Below them the stairs disappeared in darkness absolute. Their smartphones would be too bright and would alert anyone in the underworld to their approach. Luckily Hank had his candlelighter, a precision instrument capable of controlled lighting in the hands of the professional. He lit the taper with a butane lighter and made microfine adjustments to the wick in the brass tube. He cupped his hand around a tiny steady flame to protect it from the turbulence of their passage down the dark stairwell.

The air went from cool to cold, and smelled like the ancient unused coal chute in the basement of Hank's house. The walls, floors, and ceiling down the stairway to the mortuary were paneled in veined Red Verona marble that looked like it was seeping martyr blood.

Hank leaned against the curving marble staircase and steadied himself. His rubber-soled foot felt for the last step in the darkness and found the stone floor.

At the bottom of the stairs, he pulled back the wick and made a small hooded flame behind his cupped hand. He opened a pink slot between his fingers that cast a single beam of amber light ahead of them into the passage that led to the antechamber, a waiting room for the dead.

As he and Nora entered, Hank recognized an antique wooden lectern that held the original Lash family Bible, open to Psalm 23 according to the tarnished gilt lettering, so the Lashes would fear no evil in the valley of death.

The main attraction in the anteroom was the grave of Mrs. Evelyn Lash, devoted wife to Thomas Lash, loving mother to their eight children. Thomas had marked Evelyn's grave with a sculpture of a life-sized white marble angel, who was on her knees and had thrown herself over a funeral altar in profound grief, her face buried in her limp arms, her white marble wings drooped around the figure like a cloak of sorrow.

Hank held the light aloft so Nora could get a look at the weeping angel. An inscription on the base read, "The Joy that Lit the Stars is Fled." The marble folds in the drapery of the angel's gown and the sculpted feathers on the angel's wings looked so real that the figure seemed to be moving, sobbing, prostrate with sorrow.

The anteroom opened into an L-shaped hallway of funerary recesses. Another brass gate separated the living from the dead, but it was unlocked and open. Hank aimed his candlelighter beam down the passage and lit the wall of crypts. Marble faceplates with bronze letters glowed in the reflected candlelight.

He got a little sick in his throat thinking about the dead bodies in these vaults. Women. Men. Children. Their spirits preserved in marble, like fossilized insects stuck in amber.

This time Nora wasn't in such a hurry to push the gate open and walk down a hall lined with dead Lashes. He could see down the stem of the L to where it made a right turn and disappeared down another hall lined with burial vaults.

They stopped and steadied themselves, and Hank dimmed the flame of his candlelighter. At the corner of the passage, where Hank's beam of light met the darkness of the crypt, a shadow passed. Hank and Nora stopped breathing and studied the pale light reflected in a polished brass nameplate. Not candlelight, not a phone.

A figure in black, hunched over the keyboard of a laptop in dark mode. A terminal open, hands working in the blue-white diffusion from the screen.

Click-click-click.

The typing stopped. The shadow stirred, its reflection warped in the curve of the metal plate.

Hank aimed his beam of light down the hall, where they could see that one vault was open, which threw a shudder into them. Was the lid off the coffin? Was Thomas Henry Lash about to sit up and curse them for desecrating his grave? Hank parted the fingers of his cupped hand and lit the open vault, where they saw, not a corpse, but a laptop computer. The brushed aluminum lid was shut, the power cord unplugged and spooled next to it.

A laptop in an open burial vault. And someone on another laptop, just around the corner?

Nora wasn't moving any closer and neither was Hank. A single beep sounded somewhere ahead of them. The marble panels shone with a faint blue luminescence, fluttering lights, like a marmoreal reflection of fireflies hovering just around the corner in the hall of the dead.

Dark shadows broke up the flickering blue glow in the corner. Hank recognized a sound he'd heard the last time he was down here. The sound of a cement faceplate sliding on its hinges, because somebody was opening or closing a burial vault, just around the corner ahead, where a flashlight beam came on and made warring shadows on the walls.

Hank and Nora grabbed each other and took giant steps back into the anteroom. They cowered in the dark hallway opposite and walked sideways towards the stairwell up. Whoever was coming around that corner, whether a priest or a zombie, a Lash family member, living or dead, whoever was back there probably had a reason to be there. And what were Hank and Nora doing there?