Some men come home from war. Others just change uniforms. That is the premise of Impulse, the first novel in Don Francisco Bay's new Recon Priest series, which introduces Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez "Dutch" Petersen, a Marine who loses his wife and son to a mistaken-identity murder in San Diego while he is deployed to Helmand Province. The San Diego Police Department's investigation stalls, and Dutch's response is not vengeance but an unaccountable impulse to enter a Catholic seminary in the Oakland Hills. Six years later, at forty-four, a man with twenty-one years of service and thirty-six confirmed kills is ordained as Father Alvarez Petersen.
The novel's significance lies in how it uses that collision of identities to examine a question with real-world resonance: what happens when the discipline and training of the military are placed in service of a religious institution that is itself compromised? Dutch's first assignment is Mission Dolores, the oldest building in San Francisco, where attendance has dropped forty percent and the abuse scandals have hollowed out the pews. The Monsignor who runs the parish speaks in the smooth, generational language of a man explaining which questions are not asked here. Then a woman enters the confessional and asks forgiveness for letting her husband beat her children. That thread leads Dutch from a bruised parishioner to a well-dressed man arriving at the rectory's side door at 8:47 p.m., to a blacked-out bar off Market Street, to a converted bathhouse on Cesar Chavez, to shipping manifests moving through the port at eleven o'clock at night with nothing anomalous on the paperwork. Heroin travels in standard containers. American military hardware—assault rifles, grenade launchers, surface-to-air missiles that stopped appearing in supply-chain manifests somewhere between 2019 and the withdrawal—travels in the ones marked construction equipment. Cartel distribution waits on the other end. And a cleric with a lineage he has spent his life burying is using a diocese as a stepping stone toward something larger.
Bay writes the collision between these two lives without letting either one win. Dutch does not become a vigilante in a cassock. He counsels a battered mother and connects her with a shelter. He kneels with a dying man. He also runs vehicle surveillance across the Bay Bridge four cars back, because he spent eleven hours motionless on a hillside in Helmand once and this is easier. The novel's real tension is not whether he can catch the man—it is what catching him will cost the part of himself he went to seminary to build. The prose is spare and unhurried, closer to the flat, observational register of literary crime fiction than to the propulsive beats of the genre. Grief here is not a storm; it is "the permanent weather." The action, when it comes, is over in a sentence and lands harder for it.
It comes to a head at Saint Mary's Cathedral, mid-Mass, hands raised in gold-trimmed vestments, as tactical teams fan across the nave and the news cameras at the back of the church catch every second of the walk down the aisle in handcuffs. Across town, a battering ram takes a door in Forest Hills on the first swing. And then—in the move that marks this as book one rather than a standalone—Bay lets the reader watch the machine repair itself. A Vatican letter reassigns Dutch to a struggling parish in San Diego, the city where his world came apart. Neither he nor the archbishop who signed off on it knows who actually wrote that letter, or why. The men still standing at the final page are the ones no one has thought to look at yet.
Impulse will appeal to readers of Nelson DeMille, Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon novels, and Greg Iles—and to anyone drawn to fiction that takes faith seriously as a subject rather than a costume. It is a work of fiction; all names, characters, organizations, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination. "Dutch isn't a soldier pretending to be a priest, and he isn't a priest with a violent past he's outrun," said author Don Francisco Bay. "He's both, permanently, and neither one lets the other off the hook. That's the book."
