It is the future. The Italy of bunga-bunga parties and revolving-door governments has been replaced by a stern Catholic group, led from the Vatican and enforced by a team of crack priest-detectives dedicated to the pursuit and capture of euthanasiasts and abortionists. Domingo Salazar is the cane di Dio of the title. Every volume of his journal is headed by a brief curriculum vitae which tells of a young man of mixed blood pulled from the rubble of the Holy Cross orphanage in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, raised by the Dominican sisters of St Imelda, trained at the patriarchal monastery in Bologna and then at the Papal Police Academy.As the story begins, just before the Easter day on which Blessed Benedict XVI is to be canonised by one of his successors, Benedict XVIII, Domingo is obse