I was with a group of guys from my church last evening, and one of them told me he’d started reading one of my books. He said, “I was wondering, ‘How come we don’t have these in our church library?’ And then I read the first page….”

I assumed he was talking about The Year of the Warrior, which begins, as you may recall, with a rape.

That goes to the ongoing issue of how much realism we can allow in Christian literature. I assume this question also faced David Tindell, author of The Man in the Arena. I’m not entirely convinced he got the balance right.

Scott Armstrong, our hero, is a former Air Force Special Tactics officer, whose career was cut short when, in a bad situation, he made the morally right choice rather than the politically prudent one. Now he’s back home in Wisconsin, middle-aged and fit, wondering what he’s going to do with the rest of his life.

He begins to find an answer when he meets Beth, a local single mother. They quickly fall in love, and he starts to act as a father figure to Emily, her beautiful, athletic teenaged daughter.

They have no way of knowing that drug dealers in the area are planning to move into the lucrative business of human trafficking – and they’ve set their sights on Emily for their first abduction and sale. Scott will need all his combat skills, as well as all the principles of character he learned growing up, to protect his nascent family.

The writing in The Man in the Arena wasn’t bad, in terms of word use. But the author tends to talk too much, and the story takes a long time before getting into the action.

But what really threw me for a loop is the presence, in a book which seems to be purposefully Christian (it includes a scene of a pastor sharing the gospel clearly with a misguided young man) of a sex scene that’s borderline porn. I’m not saying you absolutely can’t have any kind of sex scene in a Christian book, but this one got way more explicit and detailed than I was comfortable with.

So I’m not sure I can recommend The Man in the Arena. The author shows promise, though, and ought to keep at it.