The plot of David Liss’ latest novel, The Day of Atonement, centres upon a nearly impossible, usually unreachable, human task. 

“I needed to restore order to my broken life,” explains Sebastian Foxx, the audacious, troubled, courageous hero of the story. Foxx’s life was broken, we learn in the first pages of the book, by the Inquisition in Portugal. 

Some 10 years before the main narrative of the story actually begins, when Sebastian Foxx was 13-year-old Sebastião Raposa playing upon the cobbled streets of Lisbon in 1745, the sadistic executioners of the Inquisition took his “New Christian” parents away and caused their deaths. They destroyed Foxx’s family, shattering his life into jagged sharp-edged shards that ceaselessly cut and wounded his soul. Through the aid of one of his father’s friends, Sebastião is rescued from the Inquisitors’ grasping hands and spirited to London where he becomes a ward of the renowned Benjamin Weaver, the stalwart, resolute champion of three of Liss’ previous works. 

Though he finds safety, comfort, education and affection in Weaver’s home, Foxx does not find peace. He is tortured by the nightmare he cannot cast out of his mind, namely, the horrific fate of his parents and worse, the constant, unalleviated guilt he feels for having abandoned them. 

Ten years after arriving in London, unable to bear the guilt and the anger that daily tear at his conscience, Foxx leaves a note for Weaver explaining why he must depart the home in which he found shelter. He plans to travel back to Lisbon to avenge his parents’ murder and to seek out the girl whom he loved in Lisbon those many years ago, if she is still alive. 

It is only in that way, Foxx believes, that he can atone for the “sin” of having abandoned his mother and father and “make peace” with them. As he explains, “for sins of one man against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone, until they have made peace with each other.”

So, Sebastião Raposa, now fully the Englishman Sebastian Foxx, sets out on his fateful journey back to the city that seared unhealed torment into his life. As soon as he arrives in Portugal, it is quickly apparent that danger lurks there. Having adopted the religion of his ancestors while living with Weaver, Sebastian returns as a Jew, probably the only Jew who dared to step foot in Inquisition-terrorized Lisbon.

And this is merely how the book begins! 

Liss has perfected the art of suspenseful historical fiction. The Day of Atonement is: packed with precise detail of time and place; thoughtful and provocative in the larger, moral, human issues that underpin the story; replete with a vivid roster of robust, well-developed, engaging individuals of variously noble and sinister characters; and a complex tale of fast-paced, tightly told, gut-wrenching action with myriad, unpredictable twists and turns of plot.

The Day of Atonement is somewhat of a sequel (although it may be stretching the term) to three of Liss’ eight previous works A Conspiracy of Paper, A Spectacle of Corruption and The Devil’s Company in which the steely-eyed, rakish, ethical, tender yet intimidating Benjamin Weaver is the main character. 

Weaver has been described by the author-historian Ross King as “one of historical fiction’s most compelling action heroes.” Based upon the real life Daniel Mendoza, a Sephardi Jew who was a champion boxer in London’s East End at the turn of the 18th century, Weaver is a Jewish former boxer, private investigator and debt collector whom Liss uses as a literary springboard.

Weaver is Sebastian Foxx’s mentor. Foxx, we are meant to understand, is a younger, rough-edged, not-yet fully-formed Benjamin Weaver, who deliberately places himself in harm’s way far from the people and resources he might summon to help extricate him from the dire difficulties that lie in wait.

Ever present in the alleyways, inns, and markets of Lisbon is the dark, looming presence of the Inquisition. It hovers like a malevolent ghost peering around each corner. It casts a pall over sun and sky, spawning fear and drowning courage. Nevertheless, Foxx confronts the Inquisition at its very epicentre, the Palace, “the most dreaded structure in Lisbon,” to find the man responsible for his parents’ deaths. 

“I moved purposefully, as if I belonged – another skill learned from Mr. Weaver – and made my way across the marble floors, past the great oil paintings and gilt statues and altars. So much wealth, bought with New Christian gold, acquired with New Christian blood,” Foxx states. 

“So many of my people, my family, had been dragged into this place, put to the question, imprisoned, tortured, murdered. This place was the very heart of Lisbon’s evil, the machine that fed upon human flesh and churned out ruined husks.”

Outside the Palace, Foxx sees an unassuming, simple pastry seller taken to the Palace for questioning. 

“I had seen men taken away by the Inquisition before. My childhood had been full of such scenes, and that this one unfolded according to the ancient script made it no less dreadful to witness. The man struggled and cried out for help. He twisted his neck to one side and then the other, as if looking for something that would rescue him. No one looked at him, their morbid curiosity crushed by their will to not appear too interested.

“The man shouted that he was innocent, that he had done nothing, that he was a good Christian, but the soldiers did not react…. In a matter of seconds, everything he had had been stripped from him and there was nothing in his future but torment and isolation and want. He stopped shouting his innocence and instead began to wail, helplessly and hopelessly, as he grieved for all he had known.”

Whether Foxx ultimately does restore order to his broken life – indeed whether he even escapes Lisbon with his life – is the key intrigue and creative tension that fills each page of The Day of Atonement. It is an absorbing and rich reading experience.