The arrival date of John Connolly‘s “The Sin Eater” (Atria), expected to be a juicy expose about the adventures of indicted Hollywood wire-tapper Anthony Pellicano, will reportedly hit book stores sometime in early 2007. Connolly will also have a reputedly hot piece about Pellicano in an issue of Vanity Fair coming out in, I think, May. But help me out…”The Sin Eater”? Like a guy who eats sin for breakfast? Who eats other people’s sins only to spit it back in their face? It doesn’t mean a guy who eats sin and digests it and then…this is getting gross. The title sticks in your mind, okay, but what the hell does it mean? It reminds me a little bit of the title of that Charles Horman book “The Sunshine Grabber.” How do you grab sunshine? Is sin an edible commodity? Here’s the Wikipedia page on “sin eater.” The first definition comes from olde England, when sin eating was a kind of profession or calling. A sin-eater “would be brought to a dying person’s bedside, and there either he or a relative would place a bit of bread on the breast of the dying…after praying and/or reciting the ritual, he would then remove the bread from the breast and eat it, the act of which would remove the sin from the dying and take it into himself.” How this applies to Anthony Pellicano is escaping me at the moment…maybe it’ll hit me later this evening.