Prayer
Houston FBI Agent Gil Martins’ somewhat skeptical Catholic faith is unraveling. A member of the Domestic Terrorism Task Force, he tells his supervisor, “Half the terrorism in this country is done in the name of God, Jesus, or Mohammed,” and he refers to himself as an “atheist who goes to church.” That church happens to be his wife’s Evangelical megachurch, and it is poisoning their marriage. But a series of inexplicable deaths of atheists and secular figures—they appear to have been frightened to death—leads him ultimately to another Houston megachurch. What he finds there threatens his sanity and his life. Kerr’s acclaimed Bernie Gunther series (A Man without Breath, 2013) focuses on a Berlin cop-turned-PI who is sucked into Hitler’s SS, a deeply cynical man who copes with monstrous moral ambiguities and industrialized carnage in order to survive. Martins is different: he’s a true believer careening toward a nervous collapse. Kerr, who spent considerable time in Texas, portrays Houston as a boiling kettle of “Christian Nationalists” at murderous odds with anyone who doesn’t share their faith and politics. A compelling and unsettling change of pace for the popular Kerr. --Thomas Gaughan