The Churchgoer

May 6, 2019
Mark Haines, the tortured narrator of Coleman’s provocative debut novel, suffered an emotional breakdown after his sister’s suicide. He left his position as youth minister at a fundamentalist church, took to drink, and alienated his family. He now leads a solitary life in Southern California, where he surfs during the day and works nights as a security guard at an industrial complex. Prone to tirades against religion, he also quotes the poet Philip Larkin. When Cindy Liu, an apparently vulnerable and desperate young woman he meets by chance, disappears around the same time a fellow guard is murdered, Haines intuits that a mob of drug and pornography dealers, run by evil, hypocritical Christians, must be to blame. Roused into impulsive, clumsy action, he sets out to find Cindy and his colleague’s killer. Persons of faith will likely feel uncomfortable in Haines’s company. Others, including those who admire Coleman’s poetry collection, Fire Season, will sympathize as his protagonist struggles to achieve some peace of mind. Most readers will be curious to see what the author does next. Agent: Tim Wojcik, Levine Greenberg Rostan.

May 1, 2019
A debut novel set in the early 2000s, this is California noir with a twist. Mark Haines surfs the waves rather than walking the mean streets, or, in this instance, the Pacific Coast Highway, although it does all start with a hitchhiker. Haines was once an evangelical youth pastor but has rejected his past and abandoned the family he describes as more like a postwar ruin than anything you'd put your faith in. He takes in Cindy, a woebegone drifter, and they coexist for a while in the depths of their cynicism; then she disappears on the same night that Haines' coworker is killed in a robbery gone wrong. To find Cindy, he must revisit the megachurch world of his past and trample the turf of the SoCal drug trade. Suggest this somewhat one-note noir to anyone who finds poetry in dark-journey narratives. As Bob Dylan puts it, When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)