Salvation Boulevard by Larry Beinhart

Larry Beinhart has just published his latest work of fiction, a murder mystery entitled Salvation Boulevard: A Novel. Here’s the pitch:

The corpse is an atheist professor, the accused is an Islamic foreign student, the defense attorney is a Jewish lawyer, the investigator is a born again Christian. The mystery is God.

I enjoy Larry Beinhart’s writing. He’s insightful, funny, and often seems to make people uncomfortable because his work has the power to challenge the beliefs people have about the validity of their perceptions. Here he discusses what he calls Fog Facts – truth that gets swept aside because it is politically inconvenient:

Fog Facts : Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin, was one of the first books after 9/11 that helped me find that narrow gap between official myth and urban legend where the truth most likely lurks – a truth not favorable to those in power even now. And in his 2004 book The Librarian: A Novel he did a profound job fictionalizing the very real corporate corruption that overrides the democratic process.

Now, with Salvation Boulevard, Beinhart cuts right to the heart of the issues that currently divide the country. The book is told from the point of view of Carl Vanderveer, a Christian private investigator ex-cop who’d found his way out of a corrupt police force and into the fold of the massive Church of the Third Millenium. As the book progresses, Carl finds himself at the center of a shitstorm as more and more people in the church and in the larger community become convinced that Carl is misguided, if not downright un-American in his attempts to uncover the truth about the murder.

With the Military Commissions Act of 2006 it has become entirely possible for a person, accused of terrorist activities, to be taken from their home or off the streets and imprisoned indefinitely in secret. Salvation Boulevard takes this rather disturbing new law into account, and deals directly with the kind of possibilities our new legal landscape has created. While Carl is the main character, the real strength of this book lies in the attention to consistency of belief that Larry Beinhart brought to the page. All of the characters are driven by their beliefs, including the dead, atheist professor. Watching beliefs clash on an interpersonal level throughout the novel was as philosophically engaging as the action and suspense was entertaining. And behind all of the attacks, at the heart of this culture war, there is the ongoing and overwhelming influence of the local minister, Rev. Plowright, who seeks to establish an entire city dedicated to Christian principles.

Personally, I found the Rev. Plowright so familiar, and the depiction of a town swept up in a furor so resonant, that I had a difficult time placing the events of the book in the southwest. Again and again as I read the novel I thought of Colorado Springs, and Boise, and Salt Lake City, and Wichita — places I myself have been to where religious intolerance and prejudice informs local politics in an obvious way. The vision of Rev. Plowright to construct a city dedicated to God that is outlined in the book seems far-fetched at first glance to those who have lived their lives on the East or West Coast, but to those who have lived in any area steeped in fundamentalist evangelical culture, this is already happening. One need only do a search for ‘christian city’ to find countless examples of this evangelical urbanization.

Read this book. It’s going to be made into a film, so if you don’t read this book now you can always watch someone else’s interpretation of the book in the future. But you really should read this book now, as it combines several real world scandals into one hell of a compelling piece of fiction.

Related Links:

Salvation Boulevard: A Novel