Like his author, he is not comfortable with organised religion. "I am essentially a member of the unchurched. Yet, since high school I've felt a strong sense of vocation, a paradoxical longing and belonging which somehow resulted in my becoming a nonreligious religious leader. I was on the very fringe of religion, but so far prison chaplaincy had worked for me."

He often thinks about death. "For me the comtemplation of my mortality is not morbid, not an obsession with death, but a call to life. Living with a sense of the brevity of my existence and a heightened awareness of the fragility of life reminds me to live each day to its fullest, to learn, become, and experience all I can, to truly live before I die."

He is very conscious of his own limitations: "My religion, what little I practice of it, is compassion".

Michael Lister was a chaplain at the Florida House of Corrections for seven years before becoming a full-time writer in 2000. He had come across the Father Brown stories for the first time when he graduated. He got the idea of writing about a prison chaplain, then was offered just such a job himself. He jumped at the chance of combining the job with researching the background for his first book.

He explains, "I still minister in prison. I still teach religion classes at a nearby college, and in a way, my writing combines the two. However, writing is my heart. It’s takes priority .... In addition to marrying the clerical and hard-boiled detective novels, I also wanted to create an almost nonreligious religious sleuth. Part of the tension and conflict of my own experience as a person of faith has always been my aversion to organized religion. Much of the tension has now been resolved since I started writing full-time, but when I was a chaplain it was a paradox that kept me in a predicament, and I wanted to give John Jordan the same uncomfortable conflict." He is married with two children and lives in north west Florida.

Power in the Blood (1997)
Power in the Blood is a fast-moving often vicious story of prison life at Potter Correctional Institute. It gets off to a dramatic start with a violent killing at the prison gate. Chaplain Jordan, who tells the story, is instructed to help Inspector Tom Daniels investigate the crime. But Daniels was his ex-father-in-law who profoundly disliked him, and is all too ready to accuse him of rape - or worse - when the chance comes.

The author explains that "this is a work of fiction. I write fiction because it is the best way I can think of to tell the truth .... Thus this is a true story, though none of it really happened". He has more than a page of dedications. The second one is to "Jesus, my first love. Thanks for the passion, compassion, mystery and romance".

But the text is hard-hitting and very down-to earth, as when Jordan admits he had always found it easy to chat to women: "Once liquor had removed my inhibitions, I used to be able to charm the pants right off of them". In this story, Jordan has two would-be girl friends, one of whom is married but both of whom find him very attractive, One of them reminds him that "You are called to be a minister, not Father Brown, Bishop Blackie or Brother Cadfael". But he does not give up the chase, no matter how dangerous it gets. Indeed even when he knows who the arch villain is, he seems curiously reluctant to report him - and gets severely beaten up as a result.

The homosexual activities of "the punks, the pimps, the sisters, and then the inmates who use they services" (as one prisoner puts it) are described, and prison life in this institution, where 65% of the inmates are black and even the guards can't be trusted, is shown in all its violence. As one of the nurses tells him, "If you're not a criminal when you get here, you'll damn sure be one when you leave". Even so, Jordan tries not to give up on people: "In the few months that I had been at PCI, I had been lied to more than the entire rest of my life. However, I vowed again, right there and then, not to become so callused that I expect to be lied to".

Blood of the Lamb (2004)
Blood of the Lamb sees John Jordan, who again tells the story, investigating the disturbing murder of Nicole, the five year-old adopted black daughter of two tele-evangelists. (According to the blurb on the dust cover, she's seven-years old, not five - it's surprising how many blurb writers and, indeed, cover designers never seem to have read the books!) Despite the presence of large numbers of murderer and child molester inmates, her parents were allowed to take her into the prison with them to join in their service. Jordan was horrified but could not prevent it. Then her murdered body was found in his locked office.

The strength of the story lies in its graphic description of prison life with all its brutality and sexual perversity. Jordan himself gets savagely attacked. It's all very down to earth and realistic. When a black prisoner (most of the prisoners are black) shows Jordan two used condoms that he has discovered, he tells him, "There's a lotsa sex, but no condoms. I been down here a long time and these the first I seen". Then he shows Jordan a third one, streaked with blood and fecal matter. "Why they so different? he asked. "These used in a woman and this one in a man?" It's nothing if not explicit.

Jordan has learnt to beware of compliments from inmates: "Too often, by which I mean nearly a hundred percent of time, they are the manipulative part of an angle being worked. I wish it were otherwise, but it's the reality of prison". The challenge is "to have compassion without becoming a caretaker who's constantly taken advantage of. It's a precarious position and few of us ever succeed."

He is very upset by the little girl's death. "Nothing made me question my faith in goodness - in God - like the death of a child .... Images of Jesus praying alone in the Garden of Gethsemane flashed in my mind. I heard his trembling voice begging for his life, and the cold, cruel silence that followed. Where was God then? Where was God now?"

Jordan has little time for the "flashy clothes, big, perfectly coifed hair, and liberally applied make-up" of the tele-evangelists, commenting that "that was the one thing liberal about them". Evangelist Bobby Earl's "message was one of guilt and shame, preached from a pulpit of fear and anger .... Bobby Earl's anti-intellectual religiosity and sentimental spirituality were shallow and filled with clichès. They were the first things most of the inmates gravitated toward and the last things they really needed". Jordan then discovers that Bobby Earl had himself been converted while he was in prison. And it turns out that he stood to gain a milion dollars from an insurance policy on his daughter's life. Could he have murdered his own child?

Jordan calls himself a "recovering alcoholic". When he visits his alcoholic mother, he finds her taken over by Sister Bertha "an extremely overweight lady in ill-fitting polyester pants and an untucked religious T-shirt that read 'Turn or Burn' over fiery flames." She told him, "Your mother's under the attack of Satan."
"Actually," I said. "Her condition is the direct result of her actions. Not the work of the devil .... She needs our compassion, but love doesn't involve lying to her or supporting her in denying her reponsibility".
Do you know how to bind and loose the enemy? Do you have the Gifts of the Spirit?"
"I -"
"I bet you don't even speak in tongues," she said and turned and waddled down the hallway to my mother's sickroom."
But, by the end of his visit, Jordan realises his message is too hard for his mother to take, and offers to call back Sister Bertha.

The story of Abraham and Isaac keeps recurring, and this provides the theme for Jordan's very honest sermon at the end of the book when he has to conduct the service for Nicole's funeral. "In spite of myself - in spite of all I've seen, I still believe. I trust. I choose love. Choose to believe that God is love. God asked for Abraham's trust, not his son. Today she asks us for the same thing. To trust. To trust that her heart is broken even more than ours. To trust that Nicole is with her, in the warm embrace of her love. Trust God, Jesus did."
And look what happened to him, a voice responded inside my head.
"Nicole did. And I'm trying to".

There is quite a lot of violent action before Jordan identifies the murderer, but eventually all is solved and there's even a hint of a happy ending. But you could not really describe it as an entertaining read.

The origin of this story is explained in a brief article in Mystery Magazine.

Flesh and Blood (2006)
Flesh and Blood is a collection of short stories featuring Chaplain Jordan. Some of them are violent vicious stories about murderous attacks in the prison, but there's also a rather more interesting one about Jordan's return to drinking and his graphically described sex life (his girl gets savagely murdered), as well as a remarkably unlikely tale about a nun who is both pregnant and a virgin.

But two of the stories are quite different. A Fountain Filled With Blood sees Jordan, accompanied by his long-term friend, the black Correctional Officer Merrill Monroe, meeting a little black girl, aged about ten, who has turned up at the Panama City Beach Christian Retreat, announcing that she was Jesus.
" 'You're Jesus?' I asked when I stepped into the small cell-like room and saw the beautiful pre-teen girl with the big black eyes ....
'I said I'd return,' she said, the hint of a wry smile dancing on her full black lips .... 'Is it so hard to believe?'
'I just didn't recognize you.'
'I get that a lot,' she said ....
'Weren't there supposed to be trumpet blasts or something?' I asked.
'Who says there weren't?'
'Oh, well, it's just ... I didn't hear any,' I said.
'It's a very noisy world,' she said ....
'So whatta you here for?' I asked.
'Same as before,' she said. 'The Mother has sent me to reveal her love.'
'The Mother?' I asked.
'Or father. Lover. Friend. Other. I just happen to know you're very comfortable with the mother metaphor.' "

And that's not all she knows about him. At first he was just playing her along, but he gets more and more impressed by her answers and knowledge of things about him that no-one else could have known. Then he meets a young boy who tells him he has actually seen the girl bring someone back from the dead.

But the little girl does not impress the inevitable social worker who comes to take her in.
"Honey, do you have any idea where your parents might be?" asks the social worker.
"My mother is in heaven."
"Your mom died? When?"
"No, she's very much alive, In all things. Can't you feel her? She's the dancing strings of the cosmos. She's the wind and she blows where she will."
"Oh dear," said the social worker, and the girl is medicated and taken away."But you'll be seeing me again," she tells Jordan. It makes quite a story.

So, to a lesser extent, does Image of Blood. This describes how Jordan's dying mother asks him to look into the story of the Turin Shroud, as, if it is true that it showed the imprint of the dead Jesus, she would like to see it before she dies. Jordan looks into all the arguments about its history, including the carbon dating that dated it from only the 13th or 14th century. But he also finds apparently sane people who believe that the carbon dating got it wrong.

So he takes his mother to Turin to see the shroud. And he finds that, whether genuine or not, "it, like all art, was a evidence of the divine". And he realised that, despite all his doubts, "I'm a believer. I believe in mystery and possibility, that nothing is impossible. Not the existence of God. Not a virgin birth. Not a God-come-flesh. Not a resurrection from the dead. Not even a love that is stronger than death - a love that is itself an evidence for the existence of God, of the justification of the hope I felt. Hope for Mum, for me, for the world."

For these two stories, and particularly for A Fountain Filled With Blood, this book is to be recommended.

Michael Lister has his own website.

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