Review by Ian Keogh

The rather gruesome sample page shows the death of William Richleau, Vatican Cardinal hotly tipped to be a future Pope. Because the official Vatican investigation seems more inclined to cover up than open out, a fellow Cardinal approaches old friend Charlie Northern, middle-aged, chain-smoking Scotland Yard detective and lapsed Catholic with an interest in Forteana.

Paul Jenkins once had a spell writing Hellblazer, and Revelations feels like the John Constantine story he never got to tell. Northern’s speech patterns are definitely originate in London rather than Liverpool, but otherwise you could imagine Constantine poking around the Vatican, noising up the wrong people and gradually uncovering some very nasty secrets.

After the sample art opening sequence Humberto Ramos tones down the horror for what is primarily a procedural mystery, and in keeping with the title, he’s quite the revelation. He maintains his usual cartoon style, so we have big-eyed, exaggerated people, but they’re grounded to reality by the surroundings and a particularly nice line in a dark and stormy Rome. It’s all very atmospheric.

A clear wrong ‘un is introduced early, so it just falls to Northern to prove his perfidy. Here Jenkins has people provide the interesting opinion that he’ll fail as he no longer has his faith, and the more Northern digs, the more he’s told he won’t be able to understand, but without telling him and giving him the chance to put things together. In other crime investigations this would be a frustrating time-wasting technique, but Jenkins has established Northern’s antipathy and here it works.

By the end the title has proved to have a clever double meaning, and reasoning is provided for a couple of other matters that seem too convenient, although Jenkins doesn’t explain the unlikely scenario of Northern being friends with two high ranking people within the Vatican. However everything else rolls out very nicely, the ending fits with the investigation and the screw is turned, but just not in the way most readers will expect. It should also be noted that what at first appears to be standard Catholic-bashing is actually far more nuanced, so readers of that faith might want to read all the way through instead of throwing the book away in disgust after a couple of chapters.