Losing An Old Faith — And Gaining A New One — In 'The Churchgoer'
Patrick Coleman's novel follows a former pastor, now working as a security guard, who gets caught up in a noirish adventure after one of his coworkers is murdered, but it's much more than a whodunit.
An ex-pastor, an alcoholic, and an atheist walks into a bar ... No, that's not a typo in the verb conjugation; Mark Haines is all three of these things, and rather than turning into a terrible, corny joke, he emerges as an empathetic, deeply complex, and fiercely self-critical protagonist and narrator in Patrick Coleman's debut novel, The Churchgoer.
Written as a modern-day noir, opens with a chance encounter between Mark and a young woman calling herself Cindy Liu, just before the
