Maria Martinovna Luderenko is orphaned when her father is murdered by the KGB and her mother is killed by an angry lover. She is adopted-age twelve-from an orphanage in the Russian Far East by a Minnesota farm couple. In her teens, she is molested by a priest and indicted for the murder. Following college, she works at a Russian/American computer corporation in Moscow. She goes back to Minnesota where she has a near-death experience and is told she must return to her body because she is "God's Messenger." But she has no idea what it means to be "God's Messenger," or what the message should be. Searching for answers to her dilemma, Maria discovers deceptions that Michelangelo painted into the Last Judgment on the wall behind the altar in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel. (The deceptions are real.) For almost 500 years the artist's deceit has rested-undiscovered-embedded within what appears to be a portrayal of Christ's Second Coming to judge the living and the dead . . . but that is not what it is Why the deception? Why did Michelangelo do it? Whom did he deceive? These are the questions answered by Maria. She delivers her message to a newly elected African-American reformist pope. That issue-conflating with the burgeoning pederasty scandal and the pope's threats to end the decades-long, corrupt Vatican and Mafiosi banking operations-has the Church's powerbrokers scared. Maria's and the pope's lives are threatened when a cabal-of dissident clerics and several Mafiosi-trains a para-military force to invade the Vatican and force the pope to resign. One of the cabal takes matters into his own hands. The outcome of the crisis rocks the world. REFERENCES TO OTHER BOOKS AND AUTHORS: Da Vinci Code: Dan Brown.....this book is similar in that it deals with deceptions that Michelangelo (a friend and competitor of Da Vinci) embedded in his religious paintings: in this novel, the relevant work is The Last Judgment fresco in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel. A semi-thriller, The Michelangelo Deception has a more serious--and intellectually compelling --storyline than Brown's novels. At its core, The Michelangelo Deception is a spiritual read which calls into question the veracity of nearly all mainline religions: Eastern, and two of the monotheistic religions: Judaism and Christianity. Nearly all spiritual masters had had their messages of "going within" to find one's salvation inverted by most of the founders of extant Eastern and Western religions: The consequences have been disastrous for humanity. Michelangelo makes that assertion about the second monotheistic religion to appear: the Roman Catholic Church. His message is found in the deceptions he painted into the Last Judgment fresco almost five-hundred years ago. The message? While this painting appears to be an authentic portrayal of the approaching Last Judgment, it is a mockery of that idea and the papacy which foists such nonsense on humanity. While the history of the cultures affected by these faux religions is replete with never-ending global disasters, current world-newspaper headlines trumpet our planet's lemming-like stampede toward extinction. Michelangelo's Last Judgment is an appeal to a financially and morally corrupt papacy to mend their ways. The current crisis in the RCC reveals that nothing much has changed. This novel is a platform for exposing recent divine revelations: Michelangelo's deceptions, the Gnostic literature recovered from the Egyptian desert in the last century, the non-fiction book "Conversations with God", and the Transcendental Meditation movement that offers a modern, simple and highly effective technique for "going within" to improve one's quality of life . . . but more importantly, to find one's salvation "within." As Jesus said, forget about waiting for the Kingdom of God to come with the apocalypse; don't look here or there for your salvation, but look within where you will find the Kingdom of God: That is where it re