Review: The Mona Lisa Sacrifice, by Peter Darbyshire

The Mona Lisa Sacrifice
Peter Darbyshire
300 pages
Release: October 22, 2024
ISBN 97819884080504
Publisher: Wolsak & Wynn

Peter Darbyshire is a Canadian journalist and editor, with a sheaf of books to his credit. This October, Wolsak & Wynn presents a new edition of Darbyshire’s wild ride, The Mona Lisa Sacrifice, first released in 2013 by ChiZine Publications under Darbyshire’s pseudonym, Peter Roman. The Mona Lisa Sacrifice is the first book of the Book of the Cross series.

The marketing blurb:

Meet Cross. He’s lived for thousands of years, hungering for grace – but not the grace you’re thinking of. This grace only comes from killing angels.

What unfolds in this wry, often witty, always irreverent odyssey of revenge is a re-imagining of the Jesus mythology, with a global pantheon of gods, demi-gods, folkloric figures, demons, angels and creatures. It is a breathless race through eras, peccadillos, mysteries and morally questionable moments that is a salad of DC/Marvel comics meets Homer. Darbyshire chooses a first person, unreliable narrator in the form of the main character, Cross, who, in this modern era, gets by in life by lifting credit cards and living rare and hedonistically until his need of further grifting and vampiric siphoning of angelic grace drive him onward toward his goal of finding Judas and finally, utterly, destroying him.

As with any story of this scope of the fantastic, there are huge gaps in credibility, but for the most part these can be forgiven because of the nature of the epic. For myself, I found the characters predictable, some of the plot points beyond plausible, and the story arc repetitious. But that’s me, and certainly my taste is in the minority when you consider the enormous critical praise Darbyshire has received from the likes of The National Post, and Quill & Quire.

If you enjoy irreverent, supernatural thrillers, I suggest you pre-order your copy of The Mona Lisa Sacrifice.