It’s much easier to depict wickedness than sanctity, vice than virtue. It’s much easier to portray a whiskey priest than a genuine believable saint. The reason is simple. It’s difficult to depict sanctity without succumbing to either the saccharin or the preachy. William Baer has shown himself a consummate novelist in the manner in which goodness is portrayed without preachiness in this gritty tour de force of a story, which has as many twists and turns as the finest page-turning mystery story. This is fiction at its finest.
— Joseph Pearce, author of The Quest for Shakespeare

From the opening pages of William Baer’s Advocatus Diaboli straight through to its moving conclusion, the reader is irrevocably hooked. This is a brave novel and a brave novelist, unafraid to address the unfashionable questions of faith and doubt, to posit the possibility (though never the certainty) of an immanent divinity at work in the lives of ordinary men and women, the human need for grace, and the power of redemptive suffering to save us from ourselves and each other. Baer writes in the tradition of Graham Greene, Walker Percy, Andre Dubus, and Ron Hansen, among others—Catholic fiction writers each of whom says “No! in thunder” to both the nihilism and easy belief of his era. Compelling and credible, Baer has given us that rare gift—a clear-eyed, intelligent, religious novel that eschews the pieties of doubters and unthinking believers alike.
— Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Andalusian Hours: Poems

Baer draws characters who face a world larger, stranger, and more vast than they at first know. Its sharp edges and fleshly longings are confused and influenced by forces modernity would like to ignore—ones of both great evil and divine good, that in the words of Solzhenistsyn, ultimately lie not in the physical world at all, but cut right through the center of every human heart.
— A. G. Harmon, author of Some Bore Gifts: Stories