'Salvation Boulevard' by Larry Beinhart

A Novel

By Larry Beinhart

Nation Books: 368 pp., $24.95

The best mystery fiction, beginning with the golden age of the pulps in the early 1920s, has had the unique ability to hold a mirror up to society and reflect back its ills, embracing and articulating the struggles of the day, where crime reveals the larger societal issues plaguing the common man. And yet religion has rarely come under intense scrutiny in serious mystery fiction; surprising when one considers how divisive and violent it can be (and equally surprising since the genre doesn't shy away from cats who solve crimes), though understandable for the potential religion has to drive a wedge into prospective readership. Matt Beynon Rees has successfully managed this difficult terrain in his recent novels "The Collaborator of Bethlehem" and "A Grave in Gaza" by using religion as the initial catalyst for crime, but not the sole purpose. It's a tack Larry Beinhart has wisely followed too in "Salvation Boulevard," where religious dogma dovetails into questions of inherent morality in the face of mounting criminal evidence.

Carl Van Wagener is an ex-cop whose background includes what you might expect in a typical crime novel -- a history of alcoholism, violence, adultery and a disregard for certain civil liberties -- but whose present day is entirely original: He's been born-again and now lives a Christian life free of sin in the shadow of the Cathedral of the Third Millennium with his third wife, Gwen, and his daughter Angie. The Cathedral of the Third Millennium is a mega-church run by Paul Plowright, the kind of pastor who anoints presidents on inauguration day and preaches into living rooms across the country each Sunday.

To earn a living, Carl works as an investigator, so when his friend and frequent employer, the Jewish lawyer Manny Goldfarb, catches a particularly salacious murder trial, he enlists Carl's help. Nathaniel MacLeod, an atheist philosophy professor at the local university (the novel takes place in an unnamed Southwestern town near the Mexican border) who is working on a new book that would "disprove God," has been murdered and his book has been scrubbed from his computer. The chief suspect is MacLeod's former student, Ahmad Nazami, an Iranian-born Muslim, who has already confessed to the murder, though apparently under duress and torture at the hands of Homeland Security. Carl's job is to find out the truth before Ahmad's fate is sealed.