On the run from dictators, murderers and the Vatican — the best new thrillers. Holy F*ck (Bitter Lemon Press £9.99, from April 23/$16.95, from May 26) unfolds in the heat of the American south. Swiss author Joseph Incardona’s hybrid chase-thriller-meets-satire is energetically translated from the French by Sam Taylor. Stella is a beautiful 19-year-old prostitute working out of her motorhome in Georgia. But she is selling more than sex. Somehow, her clients are healed of their ailments, and this comes to the attention of the Vatican. Rome always needs new saints but not a prostitute. A martyr, however, is a different matter. Enter the Bronski twins, the Vatican’s hitmen. Stella flees as they hunt her across the US. She is also pursued by would-be clients seeking a miracle. Beyond the picaresque storyline, Incardona ensures that Stella has both agency and emotional intelligence. She poignantly records the details of each encounter in her notebook. “Because two bodies merging like that was never nothing, never insignificant, no matter what anyone says or thinks.”-- Financial Times, Adam LeBor, Best Thrillers March 2026
“Help! The Pope’s Trying to Kill Me. Vatican thugs hunt a sexual healer.” “Praise be. When news reaches Rome that the terminally ill are being miraculously cured in deepest Georgia, the Pope is overjoyed. A 21st-century saint, and in America. There’s just one problem. Stella, the miracle worker, heals people by sleeping with them. It’s her job. This presents the Vatican with an image problem. A martyr would be so much easier to get behind than a prostitute, so it sends a pair of contract killers after her, the Bronski twins. Soon Stella is on the run and headed for Vegas, protected by James Brown, a priest who was once a Navy SEAL. The Swiss writer Joseph Incardona’s freewheeling black comedy has a lot going for it, not least lapidary prose and a fizzy translation, although the set-up is smarter than the pulpy execution, which rather runs out of steam. Even so, there’s more to enjoy in this short Tarantinoesque fable than in most commercial thrillers twice its length.”—The Times/ Best thrillers in April/ James Owen
“I absolutely loved this one! A glorious mash up of Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, centring on Stella- a young hooker who has the power to heal men’s medical afflictions simply by doing the wild thing with them. When the Vatican gets wind of this miracle worker she doesn’t exactly fit their ideal for being canonised as a saint, so two blundering hitmen are employed to snuff her out. What follows is a madcap road journey as she goes on the run with a Jack Reacher-esque priest, pursued by the inept hitmen, and others. It’s all wonderfully bonkers, dark and dirty, and incredibly funny. Brilliant.”---RavenCrimeReads
“Holy F*ck by Joseph Incardona (Bitter Lemon Press, 2026, £9.99) is a zappy satire with a high murder count, the first of the many novels by the Swiss novelist to be translated into English. Originally Stella et l’Amérique (2024), this is a story with the criminals introduced very early on and described on the back cover, so no secrets betrayed. The Pope is concerned that Stella, a prostitute who, by means of sex, cures invalids of their illnesses, is an inappropriate saint — whereas, if she becomes a martyr, then the Church can invent and use an exemplary story. The standard killers, the villainous Bronski twins, are commissioned and we are launched on a madcap chase novel through the South and on to Las Vegas, with corpses aplenty, fine writing, fascinating asides, overlapping and interacting narratives, and a Pulp Fiction vista of the bizarre, the deadly, the shrewd, and a variety of supposed purposes of life. Very much one to enjoy but also plenty to think about. And short.”—The Critic
“It’s an adage that sometimes a blessing can be a curse. That’s certainly the case for 19-year-old Stella Thibodeaux, who has been taken under the wing of an elderly fortune teller working in a Georgia carnival. Santa Muerte quickly recognised in Stella that mysterious mix of qualities that changes a woman from merely being good looking to irresistible, and guided her into the life of a prostitute. However, for all her wisdom and experience Santa Muerte could never have predicted that Stella would prove to be a miracle worker, healing the lame and the sick with her sex. It doesn’t take long for news of Stella’s gift to spread. When she wakes each morning, there is already a queue of men outside her home in the US state of Georgia hoping to be cured of their maladies. The news media are looking in to her story and soon it reaches the Vatican that there may be a living saint. The Holy Father’s delight at the news is soon tempered by the realisation that a saint who is also a whore causes some thorny doctrinal issues. Ever mindful of the Catholic Church’s reputation, pragmatism quickly wins out over spiritual considerations and a decision is made; Stella would be much more useful as a martyr than a living saint. Cardinal Carter, the pope’s man in America is dispatched to solve the problem of Stella. It appears this is hardly the first time the Vatican has had to use underhand methods to make a problem go away as it turns out Cardinal Carter has a fixer. Brenda Moore knows who to call on. The Bronski twins, Michael and William, have been killing for a long time and are very good at what they do. They tackle their jobs with not just psychopathic enthusiasm, but also with a certain degree of professional pride. Anybody prepared, as they were, to undergo extensive plastic surgery to avoid arrest, shows an admirable degree of commitment.
By the time the Bronski twins make it to the carnival site, the circus has left town. Their surprisingly subtle attempts at finding out where Stella has gone bring them to the attention of Father Jimmy Brown. A Navy Seal during the Vietnam War before finding God, Brown is able to recognise a pair of stone-cold killers when he sees them. Since it was Brown who brought the news of Stella’s miracles to the attention of the Church, and since he is able to connect the dots, he feels a certain guilt over Stella’s predicament. In another ironic turnaround, Brown exchanges crucifix and holy water for combat knife and shotgun and sets of in pursuit, determined to save her. The chase moves across Georgia, finally ending in a climactic confrontation in Las Vegas. This is Joseph Incardona’s first novel to appear in English and it’s a satisfying satire of the hypocrisy of the Church, as well as a funny, buoyant thriller that tells its story in just over 200 pages. As he explained in our interview with him, Incardona is not usually a crime writer and Holy F*ck shows he is as irreverent towards the genre as he is to organised religion. It’s an approach that might not suit every reader, but I found it a breath of fresh air. He writes in a playful, conversational style with author as narrator, and he sometimes breaks the fourth wall. I would be interested in seeing a movie adaptation. The novel is translated by Sam Taylor, and in testament to their work, I would never have known it wasn’t originally written in English.”---CrimeFictionLover
“Fair warning, this is just a little outrageous, and I absolutely loved it! 19 year-old American, Stella, is a prostitute and when certain leaders in the Catholic Church learn she is performing miracles for gravely ill men they determine that she has to die by the hands of two very experienced assassins. There is of course the potential to divide with this somewhat (!) irreverent view of the church, however as well as the provocative humour, this novel has the ability to pierce thoughts with its sharp insightful observations. Award-winning Swiss author Joseph Incardona has included himself in the novel, occasionally commenting and engaging with the reader which made me smile. I would like to add a round of applause for the translator Sam Taylor as well as the author, as it would be all too easy to forget its source as you follow this story around the USA. I loved the continuing high-wire balancing act that is performed throughout, where shocking subjects are handled with thoughtful attention. There are some truly wonderful characters on show, Santa and Tarzan were a revelation, the Bronski brothers gruesomely marvellous, and Stella and Father Brown made a perfectly imperfect team. I had absolutely no idea where this twisted road trip was going to end which was fabulous, I threw myself in with abandon and gave myself up to the wild ride. This just had to join our LoveReading Star Books as it encourages thought and feelings to crash and explode into being. Oh, and hats off to whoever came up with the title! Hugely entertaining, Holy F*ck slays with its slicing humour, smart social observations, and superbly observed characters. It deserves its whopping thumbs up from the LoveReading team.”
“Joseph Incardona is a Swiss author, born in Italy and writing in French. He’s produced not only fifteen successful novels, but also scripts for theatre and cinema. Several of his books are crime thrillers, which focus on both the psychology and topical issues of the criminal world; he has also written a series of autobiographical novels about his experiences as an Italian immigrant in Switzerland. His books have been translated into languages as diverse as German and Georgian, but this is the first to appear in English, perfectly rendered by Sam Taylor. Holy F*ck, which shifts back and forth between the outrageously satirical and the chillingly scary, is set in the other Georgia, in the American south, and its title in French ‘Stella et l’Amérique’ gives the reader no clue as to its content. Holy F*ck is more graphic, revealing and delightfully so! Stella Thibodeaux is nineteen, not exactly beautiful, nor that clever either … but very desirable – “the quantification of desire” – and men flock to her RV, her recreational vehicle, which doubles as her home and her business centre, where, by whatever blessed mechanism, God-given or otherwise, she finds she can cure them of incurable diseases, or at least, diseases that in America are too expensive for their sufferers to be able to pay for a cure.
Stella works the fairgrounds and amusement parks of southern Georgia, where the queues at her RV are becoming legendary. Her fame catches the eyes and ears of the Catholic Church, in the person of Father Brown, who alerts the Vatican, which senses a golden opportunity to polish its fading image. A latter-day saint, a miracle-worker, an icon and a young and attractive one at that. But – and it’s big “but” – there’s a catch: Stella can only cure her disease-ridden clients by having sex with them. Which is what she does for a living, because she’s a prostitute. This is the Church’s Gordian Knot, an apparently insoluble problem that can only be resolved by force majeure: Rome wants a living saint – but a saint who lives a life of sin, sex and money? The solution is a brilliant exposition of the ethical inconsistencies and moral hypocrisies of the Church: to be a saint, Stella must die. She must die young, be martyred, because martyrdom will absolve her of all her sins and elevate her sex-induced cures to untarnished, immaculate miracles. And Rome has its agents, violent but discreet, who will make this happen and allow the Vatican ship of state to sail on unsullied into the sunset … What follows is a priceless romp with a cast of priceless characters, not all of whom survive the roller-coaster of events, as the Vatican’s assassins, the Bronski Twins, pursue Stella through the oppressive heat of Georgia’s summer, hell bent on cleaning up her image by sanctifying her dead body.
Joseph Incardona is a magnificent writer, who deploys an array of rhetorical devices to enliven his prose and keep us longing for more. At one point, as one of the Bronskis bemoans having to play the waiting game, doing nothing, having reached a dead end in the search for Stella, his brother philosophises: “A classic example of Heidegger’s Dasein: among all possibilities, we remain attached to what is tangible. In perpetual transition between the past and the future.” His twin’s response is a bubble-bursting harrumph worthy of Heine: “I’m fucking sick of this.” Incardona himself becomes part of the action at another juncture: describing the state of one of the Bronskis’ victims, he remarks: “ … there is infinite grace in the simple fact of a desperately vulnerable and fragile woman being helped to drink by a man; it is for a moment like this that I was born an Aquarius …it is for a moment like this that I became a writer.” The text is infused with aphorisms of truly Wodehousean splendour: Meredith “had … a voice like gravel being poured into a plastic jug.” “Old age is like a spring roll: the tender past wrapped in the skin’s crust.” At times, they read like catechisms, though not necessarily ones the Church would subscribe to: “Grace touches only the purest and most corrupt of souls. There are no half measures where God is concerned. He vomits upon the lukewarm.” And then there’s the Pope, Simon II (the like of which we have yet to see, but who knows?), who’s an ardent fan of the Vatican women’s soccer team “ … in their fitted yellow jerseys … their determination, their youth … their tensed thigh muscles under those tight white shorts gave him back his faith in humanity.” But be warned: beneath this sparkling and satirical veneer, there lurks something very nasty indeed, an undercurrent of double-speak and pure malice, which will have you on the edge of your seat. For me this is one of the best reads of 2026” Reviewed by Max Easterman. --ELN Riveting Reviews
GARDNERS BOOK OF THE MONTH TOP REVIEW: “What can I say about this book? It took me on a journey of mixed emotions from the start. The book can only be described as the perfect Tarantino plot and it definitely felt as wild a ride as Tarantino movies! The way the book jumps between characters can be a bit jolting but overall that adds to the fast pace of this short book. I read this book in one sitting and when I first put it down, my knee jerk reaction was “I didn’t like that”. But the more I think about it, the more I think the book did exactly what it was meant to do which was to think about the bigger picture laid out.”---Gardners
"Stuffed full of deeply dark humour and a high body-count, this smartly provocative and stylish crime novel about a miracle-worker prostitute on the run from assassins, is beautifully observed." ---Star Book of the Month, LoveReading
“Translated from the French by Sam Taylor. As Monty Python used to say and now for something completely different… Swiss author Incardona has written for theatre and film and his novels have been translated into several languages. He is finally available in English thanks to Bitter Lemon Press. This is a high concept adventure. The kind of intriguing and entertaining book big publishers would never go near, it’s just too ‘out there’.
Stella Thibodeaux is nineteen, she is a sex worker and a miracle worker. A man with psoriasis has sex with Stella and the next day comes back with baby smooth skin claiming she cured him. Word spreads, it is said she can heal the sick, even cure the dying. Stella is not beautiful nor smart but she appears trustworthy, she makes everyone feel special. The Vatican is not happy the new face of God’s benevolence should be the purveyor of love for sale in a camper van. On the other hand a young dead martyr would do the church the power of good. The Bronski brothers are the Vatican assassins. They are dispatched to expedite the martyrdom. Stella, however, is not without friends – let the fun and games begin. This is a satire on faith and religion and altogether more earthly desires. Another that may offend but is wickedly funny. Has the pace of a Dan brown but with depth and emotion and truly memorable characters.” ---Aspects of Crime
“In the Deep South of the US, in Holy F*ck by Joseph Incardona (Bitter Lemon, £9.99), a young woman discovers she has the power to perform miracles. The Vatican is delighted until they realise how she does it: Stella cures men of incurable maladies by having sex with them for money. Fearing this would undermine centuries of church teachings, Rome decides there is only one solution. A living prostitute saint is a disaster; a martyr, on the other hand, is something the cardinals can work with. The task is handed to the Bronski twins, the most ruthless and efficient team of hit men in “the great, dying land of America.” This satirical thriller is funny, cheeky and bloody, but it’s also more surprising than that. By giving us the most cynical set-up imaginable, and then writing it paradoxically with compassion and hope, the Swiss author has created something bizarrely uplifting, a pleasure to read, and a small masterpiece of positivity.”---Morning Star
