Books by Michael P. Murphy

In 1971, Paul Murdock was a Special Ops soldier in Vietnam - until a bullet severed his spine. Confined to a wheelchair ever since that day, Murdock now works as a high-price private investigator, taking on cases that no one else will touch.When convicted crime boss Leo Grimaldi decides to turn informant, Murdock is hired to retrieve documents that could not only set Grimaldi free, but put many of his competitors away for life. Murdock figures that this assignment will mean a lot of money for a little work, quick and easy. All he has to do is ignore the fact that he's working for a former Mob enforcer. Unfortunately, someone else has gotten to the documents first.So begins a hunt that will lead Murdock all over New York State, and put him into the crosshairs of everyone from the Russian Mafia to his own, vengeful client. On top of all this, Murdock is also asked by his brother, a priest, to investigate a teenager who may have been wrongfully imprisoned. Suddenly, Murdock's "quick and easy" assignment is no longer quite so simple, but he knows that the bigger the risk, the greater the reward!

A number of critics and scholars have argued for the notion of a distinctly Catholic quality or character of imagination: not a matter of doctrine or even necessarily of belief, but a sensibility, a complex of intellectual, emotional, spiritual and ethical assumptions and proclivities that proceed from Catholic belief and constitute a stance towards reality that informs imaginative expression. In this book Michael Murphy brings to bear Hans Urs von Balthasar'sperspectives on theology and literary criticism to put this concept to the test and give it greater specificity and definition. The works examined range from fiction by such authors as Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Jack Kerouac, to poetry from Denise Levertov and William Everson and the films ofLars von Trier.