I have to give T. L. Hines a lot of credit. In Faces in the Fire he has, first of all, broken with standard Christian genre fiction in making his message implicit, not explicit. You’ll search in vain here for a conversion moment or an explanation of the way of salvation.

Secondly, he’s messed with the form. It’s not that nobody has ever written a story out of sequence before, it’s just that Christian novelists, in general, don’t have the confidence to do something so experimental. Faces in the Fire begins with Chapter 34, and proceeds to tell the major characters’ stories out of sequence, showing us the consequences before we see the causes. He does this pretty well, with the result that the reading experience closely approximates the mystery that is all of our lives.

Also, it’s the rare Christian novel that features a hit man, an e-mail spammer, and a drug addicted tattoo artist as sympathetic main characters.

We’re talking grace here, not works.

The story begins with Kurt Marlowe, a metal sculptor and sometime over the road trucker, who hears ghostly voices (he calls them “spooks”) in the used clothing he buys at estate sales. He does not respond to the voices, but uses their messages as inspiration for his art. Then one day he picks up a pair of shoes that put a picture in his mind more compelling than any he’s seen before. It’s an image so compelling it scares him. So he tries to throw the shoes away. But they keep coming back to him.

He meets a woman in a truck stop, who gives him a ten digit number written on a napkin, in a plastic bag. Then the story switches to her background, and passes from her to yet another character…

It all comes together pretty neatly in the end. The plot strains a bit at points, I think, but that’s almost inevitable in a tightly woven story of this kind. All in all, a very good read.

Recommended, with cautions for adult subject matter.