For a confessed atheist, the Belfast born, US-resident Brian Moore has a healthy fascination with the church. Black Robe brought Jesuits into conflict with native Iroquois in 1630s Quebec. The Colour of Blood pitched priests against politicians in an unnamed Eastern bloc country in the 1980s. Cold Heaven (later a film by Nic Roeg) concerns itself with miracle and mystery in contemporary California. And his last, the vitriolic and despairing No Other Life, is a cruel, compelling novel of liberation theology and the loss of faith. Against these last two in particular, The Statement is a distinct disappointment.

It's not that the 76-year-old has lost the clinical, clipped lucidity of his prose. That's all in these pages, alongside the economical draft and relatively abrupt length that could teach many a thriller writer their craft anew. No, what's wrong here is lack of focus. What drives No Other Life, and especially the spellbinding Booker nominee Lies of Silence, is a moral imperative to power the books' narrative motor. The Statement's Achilles' heel is an ill-defined characterisation which in turn breeds apathy in the reader. In short, Moore's protagonist is such a shit that we couldn't care less what happens to him.

1989. Pierre Brossard is on the run. An unrepentant Nazi and killer, he jumps between a string of French priories - "God has pardoned him his sins" - pursued by the law on a charge of crimes against humanity, and a radical Jewish crew bent on his violent death. Now the net is finally tightening, Brossard falls back on old murderous ways.

Unfortunately, the central moral argument - the Catholic Church's culpability in the Nazi atrocities - is not up for debate. "The Church," one Abbot has it, "is not bound by man's laws, but by the law of God." Moore goes after this hypocrisy and ethical double-jointedness like a dog with a bone but his narrative simply collapses in on itself, being too repetitive and, ultimately, irritating.

Brossard is unreconstructed low-order pond life, but in the end he is our only way in. His wife is abandoned far too quickly. The Jews and the French authorities are little more than ciphers, chess pieces Moore moves about to realise his desired patterns. As such, even as the manhunt escalates, tension is back-burnered, too much of the story mired in lengthy, fatiguing explanation. The end is more relief than climax.

Ultimately this new one reads like a half-hearted retread of The Colour of Blood. The issues at stake here are important and serious ones, but Moore is more interested in lip service than finding ways to do them anything like real justice. Perhaps, as the emotionally pornographic Schindler's List emphasised, some recent historical subjects should remain non-fiction.