Over a decade ago, young Sebastião Fox was spirited away from Portugal, a freshly-minted orphan. His parents destroyed by the Inquisition, Sebastião came into the care of the now-aged Benjamin Weaver, London’s most accomplished thieftaker. After coming of age and absorbing Weaver’s skills, “Sebastian Fox” purposes to return to Portugal, find the inquisitorial priest who destroyed his father, and return the favor. He finds Lisbon as treacherous as ever, with a maze of personal and social snares to navigate around. Day of Atonement is essentially a Benjamin Weaver novel, with all the danger, mystery, and fascinating historical richness that entails, but with Weaver being literarily reincarnated.

I’ve been reading Liss for over twelve years now, and I don’t anticipate stopping anytime soon. Day of Atonement, like his previous Weaver novels, takes the reader into a setting un-explored by other historical fiction authors, tells the story with an authorial voice that conveys a little bit of that era’s distance from our own, and builds a complex mystery with memorable characters and intense emotional drama. Deep betrayals are part and parcel of a Weaver tale. When Fox returns to Portugal, he is a changed man from the relatively innocent child who was smuggled away, a man who knows and practices violence and regards himself as almost bestial for his rage and past actions — actions the reader does not directly witness His parents and he were “New Christians”, Jews forcefully converted to Catholicism years before but still legally and socially regarded as separate, second-class citizens — not allowed to marry “Old Christians”, for instance, and constantly held under suspicion. Sebastian’s father had dealings that were intended to let their entire family escape, along with Sebastian’s young love Gabriella and her father, but instead the inquisitorial reapers swept down and only Sebastian managed to escape alive — or so he thought. There’s a surprise or two in store, and not necessarily happy ones. Although Sebastian’s goal of finding and isolating the priest responsible for his parents’ death involves a fair bit of delicate maneuvering, Sebastian’s journey in Lisbon becomes increasingly more dangerous after he meets the man who rescued him — a man who himself needs rescuing, but for whom rescue involves generating alliances and funds among New Christians and Old Christian investors — and learns the identity of the man who betrayed his father to the inquisitors. Others spot him as a man of intelligence, talent, and drive, and try working him into their own conflicting schemes for gold and glory.

The Day of Atonement is as fascinating and absorbing as any Weaver tale, though the setting is darker and more inhumane than say, 18th century London, given the hateful social structure arrayed against Porutgal’s Jewry. Unfortunately, I think I’ve plumbed the last of Liss’s historical fiction proper, though he does have another one with fantasy elements.

Note: I had planned to release this review as part of a series on Jewish literature, along with Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev and Geraldine Brooks’ The Secret Chord, but Chord has wandered off somewhere. Asher Lev will post this weekend.