Don Francisco Bay's new novel Impulse arrives as a direct challenge to the conventions of both the military thriller and the faith-driven drama, and its implications for readers may be more unsettling than any plot twist. The book, first in the Recon Priest series, opens with Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez "Dutch" Petersen on a Coronado beach, burning hamburgers and trying to memorize his wife and son before deploying to Helmand Province. Within weeks, a chaplain delivers the news that Maria and eight-year-old Jake were murdered in their San Diego home. The San Diego Police Department calls it mistaken identity, and the investigation remains stalled three hundred pages later.
What Dutch does with that absence is the novel's engine. He does not pick up a rifle. Instead, on an impulse he cannot later account for, he applies to 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. His 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 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. Heroin in standard containers. American military hardware, including assault rifles, grenade launchers, and surface-to-air missiles, in ones marked construction equipment. Cartel distribution on the other end. And a cleric with a buried lineage using a diocese as a stepping stone toward something larger.
Bay writes the collision without letting either life win. Dutch 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 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 literary crime fiction than to propulsive genre beats. Grief is not a storm but "the permanent weather." The action, when it comes, is over in a sentence and lands harder for it. The climax unfolds at Saint Mary's Cathedral, mid-Mass, hands raised in gold-trimmed vestments, as tactical teams fan across the nave and news cameras 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.
Then 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 wrote that letter, or why. The men still standing at the final page are the ones no one has thought to look at yet. The book 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.
