The Red Church / Scott Nicholson / 352 pages

"The good thing about the past was that you left it farther behind each day.  The bad thing was that you also got closer to the day when you could no longer hide from the past.  A day of reckoning and judgment."  Sheriff Frank Littlefield fears that day has arrived.  When he was seventeen, on Halloween he and a few of his high school buddies drove a pick up filled with beer to the local Red Church graveyard to drink, tell ghost stories, and dare each other to enter the church.  His younger brother Samuel (11) was allowed to accompany them so he wouldn't tell on them. Things went terribly wrong.  Samuel died.  Littlefield never told anyone what he saw that night...until now.  The brutal murder of a local in that same cemetery compels him to tell detective sergeant Sheila Storye, a crack crime scene investigator, what he saw that night... the Hung Preacher...Wendell McFall, whose 1860's sermons declared that God had a second son whose mission was to undo all of Jesus' good work on earth.  When he sacrificed a child to support his rantings, he was hung by his own congregation.  Now one of his descendants, Archer McFall, has returned from California where he became wealthy, as a preacher.  He has bought the church, resumes services, and exacts revenge.  Is he the Second Son as his mother believes?  Is he the catalyst behind the violence?  This bone-chilling work addresses the phenomena of organized religion, faith, God and evil in almost poetic descriptive language and raw emotion.