Jean-Luc Beauchard, a Jesuit priest and philosophy professor, leaves both the priesthood and the academy to care for his sister after her mental collapse. Yet Beauchard's own sanity is tested when he finds himself not only struggling to deal with his sister's psychosis but caught in the middle of the increasingly violent drug war taking place on the streets around him. Meanwhile, Lucian Bernardo, whose release from prison just happens to coincide with the recent uptick in gang violence, takes an interest in Beauchard's philosophy. Desperate to justify his beliefs and make sense of his conflicted nature, Bernardo seeks out Beauchard and questions him the only way he knows how—over the barrel of a gun. A work of gothic literary fiction in the tradition of Faulkner, O'Connor, and McCarthy, The Philosopher King is a book about faith and doubt, violence, madness, and the things that try the human soul.