Don Francisco Bay’s latest novel, Impulse, introduces readers to Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez “Dutch” Petersen, a Marine who, after twenty-one years of service, loses his wife and son to a mistaken-identity murder. The San Diego Police Department’s investigation stalls, and Dutch, rather than seeking revenge with a rifle, applies to a Catholic seminary. Six years later, at forty-four, he is ordained as Father Alvarez Petersen and assigned to Mission Dolores in San Francisco, a parish grappling with declining attendance and the aftermath of abuse scandals.
The novel’s plot unfolds as Dutch hears a confession from a woman whose husband beats her children, pulling him into a web of crime that reaches from a bruised parishioner to a well-dressed man at the rectory, a blacked-out bar off Market Street, a converted bathhouse, and shipping manifests at the port. The contraband includes heroin, American military hardware such as assault rifles, grenade launchers, and surface-to-air missiles, all distributed by cartels. A cleric with a hidden lineage uses the diocese as a stepping stone. Bay writes the collision between Dutch’s two lives without letting either win: Dutch counsels a battered mother, kneels with a dying man, and also runs vehicle surveillance across the Bay Bridge, drawing on his Marine training.
The tension lies not in whether Dutch catches the man but in what catching him will cost the part of himself he went to seminary to build. The prose is spare and unhurried, closer to literary crime fiction than to propulsive genre beats. Grief is described as “the permanent weather.” The action, when it comes, is over in a sentence and lands harder for it. The climax occurs at Saint Mary’s Cathedral during Mass, as tactical teams fan across the nave and news cameras capture the walk down the aisle in handcuffs. Across town, a battering ram takes a door in Forest Hills on the first swing.
Bay then lets the reader watch the machine repair itself. A Vatican letter reassigns Dutch to a struggling parish in San Diego, the city where his world came apart. Neither he nor the archbishop who signed off on it knows who actually wrote that letter, or why. The men still standing at the final page are the ones no one has thought to look at yet. The novel, book one in the Recon Priest series, will appeal to readers of Nelson DeMille, Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon novels, and Greg Iles, and to anyone drawn to fiction that takes faith seriously as a subject rather than a costume.
“Dutch isn’t a soldier pretending to be a priest, and he isn’t a priest with a violent past he’s outrun,” said author Don Francisco Bay. “He’s both, permanently, and neither one lets the other off the hook. That’s the book.” Impulse (Recon Priest: San Francisco, Book One) is a 304-page paperback, first edition, 2026, ISBN: 979-8-950148-49-1. It was written in California, Mexico, and Thailand. All names, characters, organizations, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.
