Some men come home from war. Others just change uniforms. That is the premise of Impulse, the first novel in Don Francisco Bay's new Recon Priest series, which introduces readers to Gunnery Sergeant Alvarez "Dutch" Petersen, a man whose life is shattered when his wife and eight-year-old son are murdered in their San Diego home while he is deployed in Helmand Province. The San Diego Police Department calls it mistaken identity, and the investigation quickly stalls.
What Dutch does with that absence drives the narrative. He does not pick up a rifle. Instead, on an impulse he cannot explain, he applies to a Catholic seminary in the Oakland Hills. Six years later, at forty-four, with twenty-one years of service and thirty-six confirmed kills, he is ordained as Father Alvarez Petersen. His first assignment is Mission Dolores, the oldest building in San Francisco, where attendance has dropped forty percent and the abuse scandals have hollowed out the pews.
The story takes a turn when a woman enters the confessional and asks forgiveness for letting her husband beat her children. That thread leads Dutch from a bruised parishioner to a well-dressed man arriving at the rectory's side door at 8:47 p.m., to a blacked-out bar off Market Street, to a converted bathhouse on Cesar Chavez, and finally to shipping manifests moving through the port at eleven o'clock at night. Heroin is hidden in standard containers, while American military hardware—assault rifles, grenade launchers, surface-to-air missiles that stopped appearing in supply-chain manifests between 2019 and the withdrawal—is concealed in containers marked construction equipment. Cartel distribution waits on the other end, and a cleric with a buried lineage is using a diocese as a stepping stone toward something larger.
Bay writes the collision between these two lives without letting either one win. Dutch does not become a vigilante in a cassock; he counsels a battered mother and connects her with a shelter, kneels with a dying man, and also runs vehicle surveillance across the Bay Bridge four cars back, drawing on his training. The novel's real tension is not whether he can catch the man—it is what catching him will cost the part of himself he went to seminary to build.
The prose is spare and unhurried, closer to the flat, observational register of literary crime fiction than to the propulsive beats of the genre. Grief here is not a storm; it is "the permanent weather." The action, when it comes, is over in a sentence and lands harder for it. It comes to a head at Saint Mary's Cathedral, mid-Mass, as tactical teams fan across the nave and news cameras catch every second of the walk down the aisle in handcuffs. Across town, a battering ram takes a door in Forest Hills on the first swing.
And then—in the move that marks this as book one rather than a standalone—Bay 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.
Impulse 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. It is a work of fiction; all names, characters, organizations, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination. The book is 304 pages in paperback, First Edition, 2026, ISBN: 979-8-950148-49-1, and was written in California, Mexico, and Thailand.
Author Don Francisco Bay said, "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's the book."
