If Chesterton’s Father Brown had been a Protestant, and in better shape, and a man of action, he might have been something like Pastor Jonah Borden, hero of three enjoyable novels (to date) by Tom Hilpert.

Pastor Borden serves the parish of Harbor Lutheran Church in Grand Lake (a stand-in, I assume, for Grand Marais), Minnesota, on the North Shore of Lake Superior. He is a widower, a gourmet cook, a coffee addict, and a martial artist. He once killed a man in self-defense. He holds court a couple evenings a week at a local tavern, where he listens to people’s problems while sipping soft drinks.

In the first book in the series, Superior Justice, one of Jonah’s parishioners is arrested for the murder of the child molester who killed his daughter. Under the seal of the confessional, the accused man gives Jonah a rock-solid alibi, but it’s an alibi he wants to keep secret. In order to clear him, Jonah has to identify the real killer. Along the way he begins a romance with Leyla Bennett, a beautiful TV news reporter.

In the second novel, Superior Storm, Jonah and Leyla go on a sailing cruise on Lake Superior. The idea is to do counseling with two other couples. Only it turns into a hostage situation, and if that’s not bad enough, an unexpected storm blows up – a Great Lakes phenomenon even more dangerous than criminals with guns.

Finally, the third novel, Superior Secrets, has Jonah and Leyla planning their wedding. Only she’s got one job she wants to do first – infiltrate a secretive religious cult in the forest. When the time is up and Jonah goes to the compound to bring her home, Leyla refuses to leave. But Jonah can’t believe she’s stopped loving him. And there’s also the matter of the dead man Jonah found on the cult’s property the other day, whose body disappeared before the police could collect it.

Tom Hilpert’s Lake Superior mysteries are a lot of fun, and much, much better than I expected them to be. Jonah is an engaging narrator (though with an irritating tendency to throw “had I but known” lines into the narrative, which kind of irritates me). He has a goofy sense of humor and a self-deprecating style. He also has a deep love for the North Shore area, expressed in some very beautiful descriptive passages. I think you’ll enjoy these books. I did, very much. The action sections often surpass credibility, but that’s a congenital problem in thrillers (and these books are really more thrillers than mysteries). From time to time Pastor Jonah talks to people about God, and such scenes are hard to write. I’d say Hilpert does them as well as I do. OK, better. The spiritual content is impeccable.

I’m still trying to figure out what brand of Lutheran Jonah Borden is. He never names his denomination; it could be most any Lutheran body. Only the fact that most of his parishioners are Norwegians suggests the ELCA or one of my own church body’s cousin groups, like the Lutheran Brethren. Author Hilpert’s Wikipedia entry says he studied at “the American Lutheran Church Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota,” but there’s never been a seminary of that name to my knowledge. They probably mean Luther Seminary, which was the seminary of the American Lutheran Church back in the day. That would probably make Jonah an ELCA pastor, but I just can’t believe that. He says things no ELCA pastor is likely to say, for instance that people ought to wait for marriage before having sex. And he speaks of reparative therapy for homosexuals without contempt. I think you could get thrown out of the ELCA for that.

In any case, read the books. They’re great entertainment, and theologically sound.