In a literary landscape often populated by one-dimensional heroes, Don Francisco Bay's debut novel, Impulse, offers a protagonist whose internal conflict is as compelling as the external one. The book, first in the Recon Priest series, follows Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez "Dutch" Petersen, a Marine who, after twenty-one years of service and thirty-six confirmed kills, loses his wife and son to a case of mistaken identity. Rather than seeking vengeance with a rifle, Dutch applies to a Catholic seminary, and six years later emerges as Father Alvarez Petersen. His first assignment: Mission Dolores in San Francisco, a parish reeling from scandal and declining attendance.
The novel's significance lies in its unflinching examination of how faith and violence can coexist within a single individual. When a woman confesses to allowing her husband to abuse her children, Dutch is drawn into an investigation that reveals a web of corruption stretching from a bruised parishioner to a well-dressed man arriving at the rectory's side door at 8:47 p.m., to a blacked-out bar off Market Street, to a converted bathhouse on Cesar Chavez, and finally to shipping manifests moving through the port at eleven o'clock at night. Heroin in standard containers. American military hardware—assault rifles, grenade launchers, surface-to-air missiles that stopped appearing in supply-chain manifests somewhere between 2019 and the withdrawal—in the ones marked construction equipment. Cartel distribution on the other end. And a cleric with a lineage he has spent his life burying, using a diocese as a stepping stone toward something larger.
Bay writes the collision between these two lives without letting either one win. Dutch does not become a vigilante in a cassock. He counsels a battered mother and connects her with a shelter. He kneels with a dying man. He also runs vehicle surveillance across the Bay Bridge four cars back, because he spent eleven hours motionless on a hillside in Helmand once and this is easier. The novel's real tension is not whether he can catch the man—it is what catching him will cost the part of himself he went to seminary to build.
The prose is spare and unhurried, closer to the flat, observational register of literary crime fiction than to the propulsive beats of the genre. Grief here is not a storm; it is "the permanent weather." The action, when it comes, is over in a sentence and lands harder for it. It comes to a head at Saint Mary's Cathedral, mid-Mass, hands raised in gold-trimmed vestments, as tactical teams fan across the nave and the news cameras at the back of the church catch every second of the walk down the aisle in handcuffs. Across town, a battering ram takes a door in Forest Hills on the first swing.
And then—in the move that marks this as book one rather than a standalone—Bay lets the reader watch the machine repair itself. A Vatican letter reassigns Dutch to a struggling parish in San Diego, the city where his world came apart. Neither he nor the archbishop who signed off on it knows who actually wrote that letter, or why. The men still standing at the final page are the ones no one has thought to look at yet.
Impulse will appeal to readers of Nelson DeMille, Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon novels, and Greg Iles—and to anyone drawn to fiction that takes faith seriously as a subject rather than a costume. It is a work of fiction; all names, characters, organizations, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination. As Bay said, "Dutch isn't a soldier pretending to be a priest, and he isn't a priest with a violent past he's outrun. He's both, permanently, and neither one lets the other off the hook. That's the book."
