Two-bit hustlers in the church and elsewhere

Mark Haines was an evangelical youth pastor in the early 2000s until he abandoned his wife, his daughter, and his beliefs and left town. That’s a sad story that many of us have heard before. What of it? 

Patrick Coleman’s novel takes us into the pastor’s sun-bleached postchurch world, a Southern California wasteland where Haines spends his days surfing and his nights working as a security guard. 

Then Cindy, a 22-year-old drifter, hitchhikes into his life and hustles him for a meal and a place to crash. As these two cynics drift aimlessly together, we get the ominous feeling that something bad is about to happen. Ten pages later, it does. On a steamy night, Mark’s coworker is murdered in a robbery gone bad. Cindy disappears.