The Healer

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

Amber Hayward is based in the foothills of Alberta where she manages a
ranch, organizes mystery weekends, writes, and studies works on Brazil,
the setting for The Healer, her first published novel. One of the many
topics for those seeking to know the Brazilian mind is the power of
prophets and faith healers, none more important than the historical
figure Antonio Conselheiro, who was the inspiration for Vargas Llosa’s
novel The War of the End of the World.

In Hayward’s novel, Manoel, a much less pretentious faith healer,
lives in 1970s Salvador and Rio de Janeiro. By a quirk of fate, he
brings back to life another faith healer, an evil figure who will spend
the rest of his life (and the novel) trying to murder his rival Manoel,
as well as his family and friends. Caldos, who brutally controls and
cheats his own followers in a secret cult, recognizes that Manoel and a
few others have a very special secret power as Children of the Panther.
Caldos also seeks to gain control of Manoel’s young ward, Joгo, who
has the secret powers, too. The epic, cosmic struggle between two
healers and what they represent—good and evil, right and wrong—is
complicated by the intervention of Harold, a young Canadian do-gooder,
and Sister Dulce, a Brazilian nun who devotes her life to caring for the
street children (another of Brazil’s endemic social problems).

Notwithstanding its weighty themes, The Healer is a very readable
thriller, essentially Brazilian in its content. Since it is entitled
Part 1 of Children of the Panther, we can look forward to further
adventures in the clash between the forces of good and evil.