The first half of this book was a solid 4 stars full of suspense, twists and intrigue. The second half, however, was a shaky 1.5 stars and completely pulled the book down.

Pros:
- Its fast pace and constant twists and turns will keep you hooked for the majority of the book
- The story is intensely creative and has a great shock impact - you won't want to read any spoilers for this book, its surprises in the first third are the best part!
- It's super easy to get emotionally involved in this book, the sheer suspense alone leaves you feeling like a nervous wreck desperate to know more.

Cons:
- The book should have ended in the middle with the latter part condensed into an epilogue or a companion book perhaps. There is a huge disconnect between the first part of the novel and the second part, it's the biggest gap I've seen in a fiction book and it just completely derails the whole novel by giving a racy thriller a rather information-dense, bland ending.
- I found it really hard to care about any of the characters, making them more likeable would give this book a lot more impact, particularly when it comes to Denise's friends and her daughters.

This book is a struggle to review. The majority of the book is fantastic, it has everything you could ever wish for in a fast-paced thriller and then some. It took me a little time to get into it but once I got past the initial story-building (which seems disjointed from the rest of the novel until you can make more sense of it), I couldn't put the book down...until the second part.

The second part of the book is where things get a bit woolly - we're given a lot of information. Seriously, a lot . It begins to read like a dry academic history textbook and as a university student studying history, I've endured a fair few of these. It's clear that Gracias is incredibly passionate about the authenticity of the history presented in the book and that it is well-researched but shoehorning this into the main narrative just pulls the rest of the book down. It's not that the latter part is particularly badly written (which it isn't), it's that it just doesn't fit in with the rest of the book and it's as though the author decided to add another book on the end of the original one. It puts a complete spanner in the pace of the reading as instead of racing through the pages on tenterhooks with suspense at every turn, you're suddenly given a lot of dense historical information that is completely out of tone with the first part of the book.
I think this is done to try and add some realism to some of the more far-fetched elements of the main story but it just doesn't mesh well and instead of adding to it by showing the reader that the story is grounded in historical research, it gives the effect of bombarding the reader with information that is tenuously linked to the story and doesn't belong in the main book. As I said earlier, if this information was condensed and made more accessible so it was as easily read and understood as the first part of the book, it would make a solid epilogue or even a companion book for readers who want to find out more.

All in all, it's a good book so long as you don't mind skipping large chunks of the latter part or battling through it. The first part is a brilliant read and I sincerely hope the author seriously considers reshaping the novel so the first part can be read on its on merit because it's a gripping thriller that'll keep you up reading into the early hours of the morning. Its clever twists and the care taken to reveal the story in bitesize amounts to keep you guessing throughout are well-worth giving this book a chance and popping it on your TBR list.

I probably wouldn't read it again unless it was reformatted in some way, I bet knowing the plot points will make it significantly less interesting the second time around too. I'd recommend this book to anyone who reads the likes of Dan Brown for its history/mystery/religion and/or Martina Cole's books for their suspense/grittiness but with the advice that, unless the book has sparked an interest in the history of religion, they could skim most of the book's latter part.

The book was captivating and extremely unpredictable.I loved reading the book till the end.I am looking forward to reading a sequel to this book.

The Devil’s Prayer were two very interesting books!

The reason I say this is that there can be a line drawn very distinctively between the first and the second part of the book, and each could have been perfectly great on its own.

The Devil’s Prayer is the story of a woman, Denise, who, after winning the lottery is abducted, raped and left to die. Instead of dying, she makes a deal with the Devil. Later on, she finds out about the existence of an old book, one part of which is called The Devil’s Prayer, and she sets out to find it.

I greatly enjoyed the first part of the book – the story of Denise before she started looking for the book. It was a page turner and it was very exciting and creative. The end of this first story was a big surprise, even though I had guessed the general lines of where it was headed.

The second part, the one about The Devil’s Prayer, was something else. It was interesting in a completely different way. This storyline was more in the vicinity of Dan Brown back when I enjoyed his works, and it had a great plot behind it. It also sort of reminded me of one of my favourites, The Historian, so that was another bonus for me. However, this part of the book also felt underdeveloped. It took entirely too little time in terms of the book, and it could have been so much bigger and more explosive. The author had a great “conspiracy theory” about a document signed between Arnaud Amalric and Jebe Noyan in the 13th century. I would have LOVED to read a more detailed and suspenseful novel about this. Not to mention that part of this story was set in Bulgaria, so I couldn’t help but being proud of our history. Sadly, it seems that the author wasn’t sure what to do with this treasure of a plot line, so he rushed it and he left big parts of it just hanging there.

The ending of the book was also not ideal. The entire narrative seemed like the introduction to a much larger story, which never happened. The ending was supposed to be, in my mind, a bigger event, and instead it was left completely unresolved. If there’s a second book coming, I would definitely read it, because the ending didn’t satisfy my curiosity.

Nevertheless, a very interesting book indeed.

This book is somewhat reminiscent of the work of Dan Brown, in that there is a detailed research focus on the history of the Roman Catholic Church, with an emphasis on the less well known parts of this establishment. It is quite difficult to be sure where the research ends and fiction picks up. However I'm fairly sure that there is a good deal of fiction here. There is also a good deal more fairly graphic violence of various kinds to work through.. The writing is intense and vivid, but with long passages of information which, sometimes, do not seem to do an awful lot to move the narrative forward.

As a result, it is hard to describe this as an enjoyable work. It is, in all honesty, hard work to read, and the graphic violence is not to this reviewer's taste at all. I'm afraid that I did not feel that I had gained anything as a reader, upon from a general sense of distaste.

All in all, a densely researched and written novel, which is disturbing and quite frightening at times. I could see it making a transition to the movie screen with some success, but not a novel that I found enjoyable.

Too many, some conflicting, sub-themes. Would be reluctant to return to this author.

This is a story that spans the centuries, starting in Spain then to Australia and then across mainland Europe.

A nun commits suicide in Public during a holy festival. The reasons for this choice are found in her book of confession. It is discovered by her daughter Siobhan. As Siobhan goes through the confession the story of her mother is laid out before her. Rather than being the mother who walked out on them a few years ago, she is actually something very different and the safety of her daughters is paramount. Siobhan has a younger sister, Jess, but it's only Siobhan who the confession is for. As the story unfold the reason for this and many other things become apparent.

The story takes us through the Catholic faith, discussing saints, secrets, monasteries, churches, libraries, books, manuscripts and codices. It soon becomes obvious that there has been a lot of research into this subject. For the most part it is well paced, only slowing slightly towards the end a huge amount of dates, places and people are mentioned, but still enjoyable and digestible. There are some brutal scenes depicted in this book and so is not for the fainthearted.

At the end of the book there are a lot of unanswered questions that I assume will be answered in a following book, or books. I look forward to reading more from this author.

I would recommend this book to readers of thriller, historical fiction and mystery. It is not a book for the faint-hearted as there are some quite brutal scenes described in this book. It is not comfortable reading but is part of the plot.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Australian eBook Publisher for allowing me an ARC copy of this book, for my honest and unbiased opinion.

I'm not really a fan of horror novels, so I did not know what to expect. But I can honestly say I was surprised! The book was well written, grabbing me from the start and leaving me scared throughout...... The book was well researched, and worth the trouble, even for a horror newbie like me! Recommended!!

I absolutley loved this book. Such an interesting premise and educational to boot. I'd never heard of the Devil's Bible before or the myth that surrounds it. This book is right up my street, and I finished it very quickly because I couldn't bear to put it down without knowing what happened to Siobhan Russo, desperately trying to find out her mother's secret. Denise Russo had disappeared years ago, leaving her daughters and mother behind, but when Siobhan realises that a nun who recently committed suicide in Spain is actually her mum, she is determined to get to the bottom of what happened to her. Stunning locations, vivid descriptions, a sinister sect and break neck storyline all enmeshed in a deeply disturbing true piece of history. Please say there is a sequel...I can't wait!

An interesting book set in two time periods. Quite grim and gory in places but an enjoyable read with good pace

This book ...was just a mess. I don't even know where to start.
What I was hoping to get: a cool DaVinci Code esque religious mystery/thriller
What I actually got: some horrible rape-and-revenge style crap ala 70s exploitation films plus a weird dose of environmentalism mixed with a bit of religious stuff at the very end

Literally the most interesting part of this book is the first few chapters where we meet the nun Denise and she is running from these monks in red robes and then hangs herself to get away from them. Then literally the entire rest of the book is her daughter reading her journal that she finds so the ENTIRE book is just info dump after info dump. At one point the daughter [Siobhan] is literally reading her mother's journal and it's talking about this other guy reading some OTHER books like ...there are just so many layers of info dump I can't handle it.

And please please P L E A S E heed the rape warning on this. I would say somewhere between a third and half of the book is Denise recounting how she got raped and almost murdered for a lottery ticket [are you serious?? the whole thing is so convoluted] and then how she got ~revenge~ on the people who did it to her. And then her getting raped again. And there was just no reason for it. I mean she had already figured out who the attackers were before they raped her so it wasn't for that reason, and I think being robbed and left for dead and ending up w/ a severe spinal cord injury is honestly enough to fuel a revenge rampage. And there was literally no plot relevant reason for the second rape either. I'm trying not to be too upset about this because I guess I WAS warned, but I'll always side-eye male authors who add the rape of female characters into their stories like this because I'm always just wondering why they do it and the whole thing just makes me feel so gross and angry.

After that HUGE detour there's some weird bit about how humans are destroying the earth and that is somehow tied into the anti-christ and ??? Listen 'humans are messing up the environment' is not even a statement I disagree with, I just fail to see how it fit into this story at all. I fail to see how any part of this story fits in with any other part. Then there finally was some of the religious mystery-thriller aspect at the very end but honestly I was just so over everything by that point that my eyes were glazing over trying to read it so it still didn't do much for me.

Oh yeah, and apparently this is a PART ONE of a series even though it's not marked that way, because there is literally NO plot resolution in this at all. It's an entire novel of diary-exposition info-dump and nothing actually happens. Amazing.

I was drawn to this book as I *embarrassingly* really like the Dan Brown inspired films, especially Angels vs Demons and this book sounded similar and it definitely was but I had quite a few problems with it sadly. The book follows Denise aka. Sister Benedictine on a mystery that pulls in all of those around her as well as secrets, religious mysteries and murderous monks...it sounds incredible doesn't it?

The first third or so of the book was amazing, so engaging and such a quick read to the point where I thought it was going to be one of my favourite books of the month but then...oh, boy. While I liked the religious mystery aspect of this book, what I didn't enjoy was all of the rape (lots of rape), torture (lots of torture), murder/crime, drug abuse and just so many vile and completely unbelievable characters that bordered on the completely ridiculous!

This is the process and my feelings of the book as I was reading it: it felt like an amazing historical fiction, then a contemporary mystery thriller followed by a ridiculous slasher gore fest then a boring travel guide and to top it off, a environmental and philosophical lecture about how human are destroying the plant...then back to the mystery - it almost gave me whiplash. Don't get me wrong, there were some good points (it was a quick read, I loved the first part and the mystery as well as the setting in Spain) but on the whole I feel as though it was written for the over the top shock factor and it felt very info dumpy towards the end. It's a book I've seen good ratings for but for me, it was such a let down and I had so many problems with it personally.

The Devil's Prayer by Luke Gracias takes you into a world of mystery and horror. The book is thrilling and horrifying at the same time. The book begins in a small Spanish town. A nun is copying the Devils Prayer from a book, a prayer that is important. Before she finishes she is chased by a group of sword wielding monks and ends up trapped in a bell tower. The only way out is death, an apparent suicide to people watching.

In Australia, Siobhan Russo recognises the nun as her mother who had disappeared six years earlier. Siobhan goes on a journey to find out what happened to her mother. A journey that takes her to the secluded monastery where she receives some documents her mother left her. Reading these documents Siobhan becomes aware of the horrors her mother faced in the past. Horrors that led her to make a pact with the devil. By possessing the diary Siobhan's life is in danger from the very monks who drove her mother to her death. She needs to find the book of the devil before they can and goes on a quest to find this.

I really enjoyed this book. It is a twisting thriller which keeps you turning the pages to the end wanting to know what will happen. There has obviously been a lot of research put into the book. A lot of historical background was evident that helped to bring the story to life. The book can be graphic and horrific as well which will appeal to any horror lovers. The book is full of surprises and the characters linger in the mind. The ending is a cliff hanger and I hope that there is a sequel soon.

Gripping read from the start. Real page turner! Highly recommended

I am currently exactly half-way through this book and don't know that I will be finishing it. I picked it out because of the description - a book about the Devil's Prayer, "an ancient text with the power to unleash apocalyptic horrors". The opening few chapters were intriguing. A nun running from red-clad monks. An apparent suicide in the middle of a crowded festival. Fantastic!

But then you get to the daughter's story - where she finds her mother's diary/confessional and proceeds to read it while being almost-caught by monks dressed in red at the end or beginning of every chapter. Let me say that I am totally fine with novels that have scenes of graphic violence, kinky sex, and out-of-the-ordinary, bloody disgusting murders if they are well written. This is not. (What mother would include graphic descriptions of her rape and attempted murder in something she leaves specifically to her daughter?!?) From what I can tell, the next 100 pages will be exactly the same as the last 150 pages - a horrific revenge tale where a supposedly normal woman takes revenge on her ex-friends with saws, knives, home-made explosives, fire, and anything other tool or shock-device the author thinks will stun the reader into loving this book.

This is not a historical horror thriller, as promised. After the opening chapters, there is no further mention of the evil monks or an apocalyptic threat to the world except as a literary device to move this woman's daughter to whatever is going to happen to her in the last few chapters of the story. But then again, I'm only half-way through so perhaps there is more/better intrigue as you get further into the story. I guess I'll never find out.

The book is written out of sequence, beginning with the present day; initially it’s about the story of a silent nun breaking into a concealed room hidden deep within a monastry whilst some weird creepy ritual goes on outside. This first part (alas – it only lasts a few chapters) reads a bit like a Dan Brown novel and immediately had me gripped. Unfortunately, it went downhill from there.

The next part of the book was written as a letter being read by the nun’s daughter, which alternated between the present day (when the daughter was reading it) and the past (when the letter was obviously set). The letter explained the events that led up to the nun abandoning her family, joining a convent and trying to track down some centuries old religious documents. Unlike a Dan Brown book, there was no attempt at plausibility when the reason for this was revealed. Seriously, it’s ridiculous. I won’t say too much in case you’re some kind of masochist who actually still wants to read this book, but it really is a stupid premise.

Anyway, the book then goes on to explain that the quest was never completed and in order to save the world, the daughter must pick up where her mother left off. Which she does. Without question.

Cue an awful lot of pointless travel around Europe while the daughter continues to read what her mother had been up to. She’s being chased by some evil monks (all wearing bright red robes, luckily. I mean, surely they would have disguised themselves? Anyway…) so she literally arrives in one place, reads a bit of the letter, a monk turns up, she gets on a train, they follow, she goes somewhere else…pointless.

The story ends completely arbitrarily after literally nothing is resolved and it looks like the whole thing was a waste of time. I couldn’t believe that the story just stopped in the way it did. I mean, I was thankful that it was over, but it made no sense. Is there a sequel? (please God don’t let there be a sequel).

Apart from the storyline, there were many, many other things that I disliked about the Devil’s Prayer. It’s incredibly simplistically written and the grammer is terrible; really clunky and awkward. I think that the book has either been edited by a child or the author simply bypassed this stage altogether. It looks like it hasn’t been proof read either – at one point something is described as spartan but it’s written ‘Spartan’ (noun) like the inhabitants of Sparta.

The characters are either completely, unequivicably good or downright evil. There are no shades of grey. Everything is completely black and white. If someone is jealous, they say ‘I always hated you, with your perfect life’. If they’re rich (female) they buy designer clothes and handbags. If they are rich (male) they have a bright red sports car. If they’re good, they fail to notice these glaringly obvious, stereotypical signals of wealth and struggle on to pay the medical bills, never once questioning whether anyone could help them out. At one point, the devil appears and just in case you were in any doubt, utters the phrase ‘Hello? I am the devil’. Aaaargh! Quite why he is talking like a California Valley girl is anyone’s guess.

The story itself, apart from being utterly unbelievable, is terribly written. It’s obvious what has basically happened from the beginning (you’re literally given this information as a recollection) and the only vaguely intriguing part is trying to work out which of the poorly outlined characters were responsible for which bit. You know they’re all in it together and you know why, so this held little interest for me. This endless interrogation of each character took the vast majority of the book, and was extremely tedious.

There were also huge, gaping, obvious holes in the story as it emerged. The main character massively implicates herself in various crime scenes; her car is found by the police, she has visible marks on her body like she’s been in a fight, a woman matching her description is seen, the scenes involve all of her friends – but the police just keep confirming that it can’t be her because she’s a bed bound quadraplegic. Plausible, you might think – until the next day when she makes a miraculous recovery and starts walking around as though nothing has happened and the police still don’t think to question her (or, you know, arrest her immediately).

There are other, appalling incidents in the book that are frankly ridiculous – the main character appears to have been chosen by the devil for no discernible reason, she has consensual sex the day after she is brutally raped, she decides that someone she has known forever is the love of her life just because she sees some good in him. Nonsense.

I came to this book with no preconceived ideas as I had never heard of the author. I imagined it as a "better" version of the Da Vinci Code with some horror and had read the trigger warnings. The surprise was how quickly I was swept up in the story. Who was this nun running through buried tunnels? Why was she estranged from her family? What would her daughter find out when she travels to the convent? There is a lot going on here and it is obvious the author is well versed in arcane information. But he wears his learning lightly. This is a fictional roller coaster ride not a lecture. but the knowledge adds to the story by making it seem "real". Recommended if you enjoy a good page turner with a bit of depth.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

I was instantly grabbed when I started this book, though unfortunately, the pacing and structure resulted in a story I was much less engaged with than I had hoped.

When a nun commits suicide in Spain and is identified as the missing mother of Australian Siobhan Russo, Siobhan travels to Europe to try to find out what happened to her mother. As she reads the confession written by her mother in the last months of her life, she is pursued by monks in red robes, who are after vital information that Siobhan’s mother was determined to take to her grave.

This book really tells four stories: Siobhan’s, her mother Denise’s, the story of a priest in the 1970s, and the story of a medieval priest. I felt that the scenes from Siobhan’s POV were the strongest; however, these scenes were actually in the minority.

The majority of the book is in the form of Siobhan’s mother’s confessional, in which she details the deal she made with the Devil and its aftermath. Perhaps this is due to it being in diary format, but I felt that there was far more telling than showing, which affected how easily I connected to the characters. The two stories set in the 1970s and further back in medieval times are only introduced in the last 20% of the story, and for the most part, consisted of rather a lot of historical info-dumping that slowed the story right down at the point where it was supposed to reaching the climax.

Having said that, even though I didn’t find the story engaging all the time, the writing style was easy to read and I got through it much faster than I expected.

To finish, I just want to give a content warning for some rather gruesome murder scenes. They certainly aren’t for the faint of heart.

This reminded me a lot of The DaVinci Code but for various many reasons. It is completely different but the plot does keep you wondering through the mystery if it is going to be solved or not. Much like DaVinci Code there must have been a TON of research done for this. The actual historical facts that are interwoven are spectacular and make the book fantastic.

The plot starts immediately and I was taken aback by many things that happened just in the first chapter. The entire rest of the book is used to explain what happened in the first chapter and why.

I enjoyed how the plot was written. It is written through letters that are a confession to her oldest daughter. Most of it is surrounding a mother and her feelings for her children and her findings in the time she has been away from her children.

The characterization is fantastic. The story is categorized under horror and there are some horrific elements involved. Very horrific in some cases. There are cases of rape, death (lots of death) but in the normal category of horror, as in compared to something like the Exorcist, I didn't think this was very horrific. I had thoughts that this would be super scary and leave me with nightmares but really it was pretty tame, in that aspect.

I did, however, leave me with a lot of thoughts while reading and after I finished! It was so well done, and the imagery was so vivid that I felt like I was a part of the story. The phone would ring or my dogs would bark and I was shaken back into reality. While, some of the story line was a little slow, and there was a bit at the end that will definitely be a bit annoying to those that do not want to listen to liberal rhetoric, I thought the entire of it was so well done that I could not put it down. Only in times of necessity.

The ending was a bit weird. I searched and searched for a part two but found nothing. I think this is how it is supposed to end with leaves questions but also leaves answers. It's not how I would have wanted it to end but it was GREAT.

In short: Absolutely fantastic. I loved nearly every word.

My review has been placed on Goodreads and Amazon.

The Devil's Prayer is a historical fiction meets thriller/mystery. On the one hand, you have a horrific incident fueled by greed which ends with quadriplegia and on the other hand, you have a biblical mystery. The pin that holds both sides together is the Devil himself. Can our main character Siobhan find out why her mother left her 6 years ago without a good bye. Why her mother became a nun and why she committed suicide in front of thousands? Will Siobhan believe in what she finds out and will she choose the right course to take once she has all the answers. This book was a thrilling ride. If you like Dan Brown you will love Luke Gracias.