Pontiff is about a plot to kill the pope.  Mixed into this a complicated subplot about financial misdealings and corruption in the Vatican.

So here we have screaming headlines about a plot to kill Pope Benedict

And here we have the New York Times reporting about a  leaked documents detailing financial misdealings and corruption in the Vatican.

You’d think they got their hands on an advance copy of my novel!

Of course, art is also imitating life, because there were financial misdealings and corruption at the Vatican Bank in the 1980s.  And papal assassination attempts are nothing new: John Paul II was shot, and there have been no end of conspiracy theories about the sudden death of John Paul I a month into his reign.  (The most likely explanation for discrepancies in the Vatican’s reports of his death is that they thought it unseemly that his body had been discovered by a nun. Quelle horreur!) There are some strange goings-on in Pontiff, but there are strange goings-on in the Vatican all the time.