Thrillers, Literary Styles & Movements - Fiction, Crime Fiction

Salvation Boulevard

Name: Salvation Boulevard
Author: Larry Beinhart
ISBN: 9781568586724

by Larry Beinhart

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Overview

"Ahmad Nazami is an Iranian-born Muslim, accused of murdering his professor." "Left behind at the crime scene are a few pages of the professor's manuscript that purports to disprove the existence of God. The rest of it - gone missing." "Nazami's lawyer, Emmanuel "Manny" Goldfarb is the best criminal attomey in town." "Manny's investigator is Carl Vanderveer. Once he'd been a cop with a life spiraling out of control. Then Pastor Paul Plowright brought him to Jesus; in the nick of time, too. Now all he wants is to live clean and straight, with his daughter and his wife (his third; the good one, that came after Jesus), and do his job." "But as Carl gets deeperand deeper into the investigation of the murdered professor, his most basic beliefs and relationships are tried and his world is turned upside down. The mega-church, the pastor, and his new wife have redeemed Carl from a life of grim debauchery. Now they insist on him dropping the case. But he can't stop searching for the real killer and the truth - no matter what the personal cost." Salvation Boulevard has a corpse. Along the way there's sex and money, thugs and lawyers, politicians and prayer meetings, but at the end of the road, at the heart of it all, like a riddle wrapped in an enigma, is the mysterious meeting of man and God.

About the Author, Larry Beinhart

Larry Beinhart is the author of Wag the Dog, on which the film starring Robert DeNiro was based, as well as The Librarian, Fog Facts, You Get What You Pay For, Foreign Exchange, and No One Rides for Free, which received the 1987 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. His writing has earned him numerous accolades, including three Edgar Award nominations and a Fulbright Fellowship. Larry currently resides in Woodstock, New York, with his wife and two children. Audiobook veteran and AudioFile Earphones Award winner Michael Kramer has recorded more than two hundred audiobooks for trade publishers and many more for the Library of Congress Talking Books program. His audiobooks include North and South by John Jakes, and a number of other Jakes titles; capers and mysteries by Donald E. Westlake (a.k.a. Richard Stark), including Money for Nothing; and Robert Jordan's fantasy-adventure fiction. In addition, Michael received Audie Award nominations for The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson and Dead Aim by Thomas Perry, and a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award for Savages by Don Winslow.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Best known for American Hero(1994), the jaunty political novel that became the film Wag the Dog, Beinhart offers something less jaunty but definitely more ambitious in this splendid religious legal thriller. When Ahmad Nazami, a Muslim scholarship student at the University of the Southwest, confesses under duress to the murder of Nathaniel MacLeod, an atheist philosophy professor, PI Carl Van Wagener, a born-again Christian, agrees to help Manny Goldfarb, a celebrated Jewish defense lawyer, prove Nazami's innocence. Van Wagener, a member of charismatic pastor Paul Plowright's Cathedral of the Third Millennium, is soon on the trail of a missing manuscript MacLeod wrote disproving God's existence. In a beautifully understated author's note, Beinhart lays out the factual basis for his provocative morality tale and invites readers to visit his Web site, which includes "a forum for an ongoing dialogue about religion, irreligion, faith, belief, and their intersections with politics, war, money, life, and death." (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

A born-again Christian private eye's faith is shaken to the core when he takes the case of the Muslim student suspected of killing his atheist professor. "The despair an atheist must feel is unimaginable to a believer," says Pastor Paul Plowright of philosophy professor Nathaniel MacLeod's suicide. Cogent as this pious argument might be-certainly MacLeod's in no position to refute it-it goes out the window with the news that MacLeod's magnum opus, a proof that God does not exist, has gone missing; his despairing suicide was actually murder. Recovering smartly, the authorities arrest Ahmad Nazami, 21, a Persian-born U.S. citizen they label a jihadist, and beat a confession out of him. Ahmad's lawyer, Manny Goldfarb, responds by calling in Carl Van Wagener, an ex-cop investigator who's a stalwart member of Plowright's supersized congregation, the Cathedral of the Third Millennium. Or maybe not so stalwart, since Carl's easily tempted from the side of his helpmeet Gwen by the flirtatious wiles of MacLeod's widow. Should Ahmad be tried in the state system or turned over to the feds? How much does Carl owe his old friend Manny and his scared client? When rumors arise that Plowright's up to his crucifix in the case, whom can Carl believe? Does Gwen owe him the unquestioning loyalty prescribed by St. Paul, or does she need to be subject to him only when he's subject to Pastor Paul? And what sort of loyalty does Carl owe Gwen if he thinks she set up his run-in with hired killers? Satirist/scold Beinhart (Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin, 2005, etc.) keeps leaping from one moral conundrum to another, each weightier and more abstract than the last. Too top-heavy withunassimilated questions to work as a novel of ideas, with a mystery whose solution is too obvious for a genre piece, Beinhart's overheated curiosity still delivers many pleasures from both genres.

From the Publisher

"A gripping, page-turning tale that takes one through bad lawyers and good ones, treachery and faith, pornography and preaching, torture and Homeland Security. Salvation Boulevard is a great and memorable [listen]." —-Vincent Bugliosi