Soul tracker

© 2004 Dru Pagliassotti
All rights reserved.

Soul Tracker
Bill Myers
2004, Zondervan
ISBN 0-310-22756-9

David Kauffman is struggling with a crisis of faith. His teenage daughter, Emily, committed suicide, and he fears that she's condemned herself to hell. But how could a loving God sentence a bright, sensitive, but disturbed girl to hell simply because she succumbed to a moment of tragic despair? Moreover, when Emily’s boyfriend brings her journal to David from the clinic where Emily had been under treatment, David’s unease grows. It seems from his daughter’s journal entries that she’d found faith and was on her way to psychological recovery. He needs to know what happened and whether she’s in heaven or hell. Desperate, David approaches psychic investigator Gita Patekar, who works for Life After Life, and asks her for help contacting his daughter.

Over the course of his investigations, Gita, Billy “Preacher Man” Ray, and social worker Adrianna all point out to David that God doesn't let souls return from the dead ... but malicious spirits may pretend to be a lost loved one to seduce a believer into sin. David won't listen. A sudden burst of radio dedications and text messages from dead Emily convince David and his son Luke that she's reaching out to them from the afterlife. Filled with hope and concern, David relentlessly searches for the truth, even to the point of entering Life After Life’s virtual afterlife simulator. However, it isn't long before his search for Emily’s fate takes a nasty turn, endangering him and his son — in both this world and the next.

Soul Tracker is a new offering in the rapidly growing genre of Christian-themed suspense. Like many of the books in this expanding field, it takes a difficult question of faith (in this case, "why are suicides damned?") and seeks to answer it in a way that will both entertain and educate. Writing to a religiously inclined but critical reading audience, Soul Tracker shuns the simplistic answers offered by childhood catechisms and priests uninclined toward theological nuance and seeks to explain people’s relegation to heaven or hell in a plausible and palatable way.

As one would expect from a novel published by Zondervan Books — perhaps better known to readers for its bestseller The Purpose-Driven Life — Soul Tracker is unabashedly, if nondenominationally, Christian, going so far as to show Gita criticizing her native culture's concept of reincarnation. It's a book by Christians for Christians. However, it’s Christianity for readers looking for answers that make sense in a modern world.

Non-Christians often give Christian fiction a bad rap, and for good reason. Most of it is poorly written and preachy; few Christian speculative fiction writers are as talented as, say, C.S. Lewis, Dean Koontz or even Frank E. Peretti. Myers already has a number of novels behind him, however, and Soul Tracker is solidly midlist, containing a few passages of evangelistically heavy dialog but otherwise presenting a suspenseful plot full of social corruption, scientific double-dealing, gunplay, political blackmail and fantastic virtual-reality explorations. Myer's cinematic writing style reveals his filmmaking background; it wouldn't be hard to imagine Soul Tracker on the big screen.

Readers with little interest in Christianity are likely to find Soul Tracker heavy-handed, but members of Zondervan Books' target audience will find Soul Tracker an entertaining evening’s read.

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