This is a book I mistook for a promising novel by a Christian writer. Having finished it, I still consider it a promising novel (the author has gone on to write several and seems to be doing well). I’m not so sure about the Christianity. Though Preacher Finds a Corpse (awful title) is not exactly anti-Christian either.

Evan Wycliff grew up in Apple Center, Missouri, and then went away to Harvard to study theology. Then he studied astrophysics. Then, after a personal tragedy, he went home again, where he now works as a bill collector for a car dealer and now and then preaches in local congregations. Hence his nickname, “Preacher.”

His return allowed him to reconnect with his boyhood best friend Bob, though they haven’t actually spent much time together. Nevertheless, Evan is shocked when, one morning when he’s on his way to join some buddies on a turkey hunt, he finds Bob’s dead body waiting on the path. Bob has apparently shot himself to death with a pistol.

Evan is not a serious suspect in the case. In fact, the sheriff quickly closes the case, but confides to Evan in private that he wouldn’t mind having someone look a little closer at it. Bob’s financial affairs had been in disarray. A farm he’d been renting to a friend was about to be taken over by the government, and Bob had told the friend not to worry – he’d prevent that from happening. Only now he can’t. And Bob’s beautiful wife, who’s set to inherit all his property, seems less than devastated. And what is it with the property, anyway? Why is there no clear title? Why is an area there fenced off by the military?

Evan will poke around in his low-key way, digging up some history, and some people will feel threatened. Physical attack and involuntary commitment to an institution are just some of the challenges Evan will face. But in the end the truth will out.

I found Preacher Finds a Corpse a promising book in terms of narrative. Evan is a layered character, and the other characters are complex too. I thought the prose a little weak – the author needed to move the story along faster. He’s probably figured out how to do that by now.

The plotting was weak, I thought, in the sense that everything turns out to be less than the reader expects. The conclusion was kind of flat. Another problem was that one surreal plot element – Evan having conversations with the imagined spirit of his dead fiancée – doesn’t start happening until half-way through the book. If you’re going to add that kind of mystical element, you need to establish it earlier in the story.

But my main problem was theological. Evan is supposed to be a popular supply preacher in the small-town churches around Apple City. But, judging by the topics he preaches on, he’s only marginally orthodox (or not orthodox at all). He tells the people in the pews that “God is all there is” (pantheism). He questions whether human souls in Heaven possess personality. I have trouble believing small town preachers would put up with that sort of thing. However, I suspect the author means well. I think he wants us to like these people because they’re open to “original” ideas.

Preacher Finds a Corpse wasn’t awful. But I didn’t like it enough to go on to the sequels.