For the novel by Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...

, see Messiah (1954 novel)
Messiah is a thriller novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 writer Boris Starling

Boris Starling

Boris Starling is a British novelist and screenwriter. He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first in History.-Life:Starling is the great-grandson of the English physiologist Ernest Starling...

, published in 1999. Following the success of the novel, a sequel, Storm (2000), was also released.

The novel became the basis for the popular BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 TV series Messiah

Messiah (TV series)

Messiah is a British television drama series, broadcast on the BBC One network and produced in-house by BBC Northern Ireland, although the series itself is set in England. Made up of a series of occasional serials, the first, with two parts subtitled The First Killings & The Reckoning, was...

, starring Ken Stott

Ken Stott

Kenneth Campbell "Ken" Stott is a Scottish actor, particularly known in the United Kingdom for his many roles in television.-Early life:...

.

Plot summary

The novel opens with the discovery of the body of Philip Rhodes, a London caterer, who is found hanging in his underwear from his banister, his tongue cut out and a silver spoon in its place. When the body of the Bishop of Wandsworth, James Cunningham, is found beaten to death, but with his tongue replaced by a silver spoon, DCI Red Metcalfe and his team must discover the pattern behind these killings and save the rest of the men who are destined to be murdered.
The novel has many twists and turns and it describes the killings in great detail adding to the intense atmosphere.
Starling manages to create a novel which is difficult to put down and which explores the mind of a man who has thoughts of a higher being.