Unfortunately, none of Breslin's other layers here are any more convincing than this limp, unsupported, B-movie psychology: her cop-talk is effortfully, stiltedly super-dirty her psychiatrists are cartoons and all her women, nuns included, talk and think in the breathy, italicized rhythms of That Cosmopolitan Girl: ""Oh God. Result: a slow, gabby, revolving narrative that finally comes together in Angela's trial for manslaughter, and in Meg's realization that Angela, though kept crazy by ""those fucking lunatic nuns,"" must have been a split personality all along (""Two persons? My God, Tim, you mean she's two persons?""). Thus begin three parallel lines of inquiry: the cops build their case, tracking down the father of Angela's baby (an unstable drifter who describes Angela as sexily eager) the head doctors work with crazily prim Angela, who at first denies all awareness of the conception, the pregnancy, the birth, or the murder and foul-mouthed reporter Meg Gavin tries to tune in on the real Angela while researching the unnatural sex lives of nuns and brooding on her own restless bedroom action (""Once again she'd let herself go quickly, fiercely, down into the fucking""). Perky, pretty Sister Angela, formerly Gayle Flynn, is found hemorrhaging at her Minnesota convent and is rushed to the hospital (""Something-someone-had ripped this woman open from the vagina to the rectum"") and when the doctors discover clear evidence of a recent birth, the mortified nuns search the convent, finding the gagged-to-death infant (his mouth stuffed with a nightgown) behind a bookcase. Presumably inspired (if that's the word) by a recent real-life case, Breslin has stretched a National Enquirer headline-Nun Murders Newborn Baby-into 600 talky, overwrought pages of ghoulish police-procedural, humdrum courtroom drama, sleazy sex survey, and half-baked psychopathology.
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