Don Francisco Bay's 'Impulse' Launches Recon Priest Series

In Don Francisco Bay's new novel, Impulse, Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez "Dutch" Petersen returns from war to learn that his wife and son were murdered in their San Diego home. The police call it mistaken identity, and the case goes cold. Instead of seeking revenge, Dutch applies to a Catholic seminary, and six years later, at forty-four, he becomes Father Alvarez Petersen. His first assignment is Mission Dolores in San Francisco, a parish hollowed out by abuse scandals and declining attendance. When a woman confesses to letting her husband beat her children, Dutch pulls a thread that leads from a bruised parishioner to a well-dressed man at the rectory, a blacked-out bar off Market Street, a converted bathhouse on Cesar Chavez, and ultimately to shipping manifests moving heroin and American military hardware through the port. Bay writes the collision between Dutch's two lives without letting either win: he counsels a battered mother and kneels with a dying man, but also runs vehicle surveillance across the Bay Bridge. The novel's tension is not whether he can catch the man, but what catching him will cost the part of himself he went to seminary to build. The prose is spare and unhurried, closer to literary crime fiction than genre thriller. The climax unfolds at Saint Mary's Cathedral, mid-Mass, as tactical teams fan across the nave. Then Bay lets the reader watch the machine repair itself: a Vatican letter reassigns Dutch to a struggling parish in San Diego, and neither he nor the archbishop knows who actually wrote it. Impulse will appeal to readers of Nelson DeMille, Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon novels, and Greg Iles. It is a work of fiction; all names, characters, organizations, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination.