UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By Gerard DeGroot March 7

THE NUNS OF SANT’AMBROGIO
The True Story of a Convent in Scandal
By Hubert Wolf
Translated from the German by Ruth Martin
Knopf. 476 pp. $30

Sister Maria Luisa was the novice mistress at the Sant’Ambrogio convent in Rome. She was intelligent, charismatic and stunningly beautiful. She was also a sociopath, embezzler, false saint, sexual predator, pathological liar and murderer.

How do you solve a problem like Maria?

Had her crimes been committed outside the convent, the problem would have been easily solved. Maria Luisa would have been arrested, tried and quickly executed. But she was a nun, which meant that the real concern was not the victims she raped and murdered, but the threat she posed to the Catholic Church.

The jacket of “The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio” promises an “incredible story of how one woman…