In a publishing landscape saturated with vigilante heroes, Don Francisco Bay's new novel Impulse arrives with a different proposition: a man who has killed for his country and now kneels for its God. The first installment of the Recon Priest series, released this October, follows Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez "Dutch" Petersen, a Marine who returns from Afghanistan to learn that his wife and eight-year-old son were murdered in their San Diego home. The police call it mistaken identity. The investigation stalls.
Rather than pick up a rifle, Dutch applies to a Catholic seminary in the Oakland Hills. Six years later, at forty-four, he is ordained as Father Alvarez Petersen and assigned to Mission Dolores, San Francisco's oldest building. Attendance has dropped forty percent; the abuse scandals have emptied pews. When a woman enters the confessional and asks forgiveness for letting her husband beat her children, Dutch begins to pull a thread that leads to a heroin and weapons pipeline moving through the Port of Oakland, involving military hardware that vanished from supply-chain manifests between 2019 and the withdrawal. The trail ends at Saint Mary's Cathedral, where tactical teams interrupt mid-Mass and cameras capture a priest in handcuffs.
The novel's significance lies in its refusal to resolve the tension between Dutch's two identities. As Bay writes, "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 duality gives the book its moral weight and distinguishes it from conventional thrillers. The prose is spare and observational, with grief described as "the permanent weather." Action sequences are brief but impactful, landing harder for their economy.
Bay's narrative also takes faith seriously as a subject, not a costume. Dutch counsels a battered mother, kneels with a dying man, and runs surveillance across the Bay Bridge. The central question is not whether he can catch the criminal, but what catching him will cost the part of himself he went to seminary to build. The antagonist is a cleric with a hidden lineage, using a diocese as a stepping stone toward something larger, adding a layer of institutional critique that resonates amid ongoing debates about accountability within religious organizations.
For readers of Nelson DeMille, Daniel Silva, and Greg Iles, book one ends with a Vatican letter reassigning Dutch to a struggling parish in San Diego, the city where his world came apart. Neither he nor the archbishop who signed off knows who actually wrote that letter. The men still standing are the ones no one has thought to look at yet. That unresolved thread signals a series with more on its mind than revenge. Impulse is a work of fiction; all names, characters, organizations, and incidents are products of the author's imagination.
