Passing Judgment

As the national debate between Hollywood and the Christian Coalition heats up, one man must battle an entire town's prejudice to find a fundamentalist killer.
With the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign upon us and the players ranging from the Hollywood elite to the Religious Right, Passing Judgment is a novel poised on the border between politics and religion. In this charged atmosphere, New Spirit stands at the center of Southern Christian fundamentalism, a high-profile showplace where everyone knows one another but no one is quite what he seems. And these followers and residents of New Spirit are clashing with their local devil...Baird Lowen.
A highly acclaimed Hollywood director forced into early retirement as a result of tragedy on the set of his last masterpiece, Baird is content to fish for bass in the nearby pond and write incendiary articles about New Spirit. But when the fiery death of a fellow detractor spurs Baird to find the murderers, he must first uncover a plot of extortion that circles back on his own troubled past.
National anti-drug crusader and gubernatorial hopeful Roy Duncan is the right-hand man to New Spirit's Reverend Frederick Prescott, and both are suspects in Baird's private search for the killers. But it is Roy who seeks Baird out with an offer he really can't refuse: Find Roy's blackmailer or suffer the exposure of his own tragic secret.

The former longtime editor-in-chief of Omni magazine makes a strong fiction debut?not with science fiction, however, but with a morally charged crime novel set in rural North Carolina. Narrator Baird Lowen lives a hermit's life, four years after retiring due to a violent incident, shown in flashback, at the height of his Hollywood directing career. His former high-school classmate, meanwhile, rising state legislator Roy Duncan, who married Baird's first love, Ellen, has become a powerful attorney closely allied to televangelist mogul Frederick Prescott. Using the incident that drove Baird from Hollywood as leverage, Roy coerces the former filmmaker into returning to their home town to find out who has been threatening to release graphic photos of Ellen having sex with Baird, taken when they were 16 years old. Despite the overlay of violence and death, this novel is not so much a thriller as a forceful yet balanced examination of the rise to political power of the religious right. The plotting is smooth and the characters true, particularly those who wield power with a sure and ruthless charm. Ferrell proves a natural storyteller here, with a voice all his own.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A wunderkind film director forced into early retirement becomes embroiled in old causes and ancient crimes in this too- tentative thriller from Omni editor-in-chief Ferrell (John Steinbeck, a 1986 YA title, etc.). Having distanced himself from Hollywood in the wake of a hushed-up scandal that threatened completion of his last picture (the commercially successful Moonstalk), world-weary Baird Lowen wants little more than to return to his Deep South roots, dabble in journalism, and fish for bass on his rural farmstead. But old high- school buddy Roy Duncan comes out of the past to pressure him into frustrating a blackmail scheme. An upwardly mobile attorney with gubernatorial ambitions and a pillar of the New Spirit for American Morality movement, Roy has received a pointed warning that he'd better withdraw from political life, complete with for-sale photos of his wife Ellen making whoopee with Baird when both were teenagers. Baird returns to Samson, N.C., in pursuit of the extortionist. Once back in his hometown (where New Spirit is headquartered), he finds certain of the natives surprisingly friendly--including Frederick Prescott, founder of the multinational ministry. As crafty and good-hearted as he is charismatic, the TV evangelist makes a low-key effort to enlist Baird in his crusade. Meantime, Baird manages to identify the shakedown artist, but before he can deal with him, the suspect (a ne'er-do-well classmate) dies in a fire that local authorities refuse to label suspicious. This dubious finding sets Baird off on another hunt, during which he takes some lumps from born-again heavies. At the close, he is off the hook, and the presumably culpable New Spirit disciples have either perished or been banished from Eden. A tepid, tedious tale that fails to capitalize fully on a potentially intriguing theme: apostles of the Religious Right finding themselves at odds with their own values as well as with those of secular society. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

New Spirit Ministries, led by the charismatic televangelist couple Frederick and Betty Prescott, dominates the cultural and social life of Samson, North Carolina. The Prescotts' chosen man, Roy Duncan, is preparing to run for governor until sexually explicit pictures of Duncan's wife, Eileen, turn up in their mailbox, with a suggestion that he drop his political ambitions. Duncan reluctantly turns to his nemesis Baird Lowen for help. Lowen had been a successful film director until he killed a man during a grueling location shoot and was forced into a hermitlike existence in the North Carolina mountains. Lowen was also Eileen's first boyfriend, and the photos, taken before Eileen joined New Spirit, show her making love with Lowen. Repulsed by New Spirit and Duncan's politics, Lowen resists getting involved until Duncan plays his trump card: he has evidence that could put Lowen away for the old murder. Although the climax seems rushed, this is a very good novel, full of unexpected turns, interesting characters, and a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Prescott and his church. George Needham

After an intriguing opening, in which former Hollywood director Baird Lowen revisits a childhood home that is now a center for Christian evangelism, the plot of this first novel wanders off distractedly into a confusing melange of right-wing philosophy, murders, and television sermons. New Spirit is a flourishing religious movement led by Frederick and Betty Prescott, who have made their headquarters in the small town of Samson. As Lowen attempts to unravel several mysteries, his first ally is Shelby Oakes, a high school English teacher recently fired for teaching Hemingway and Faulkner. The Prescotts, who are larger than life, work at leading sinners (including Lowen) to virtue and succeed in an astonishing number of instances. It's next to impossible to discern any message here, but the book works no better as a mystery. The reader is finally left with the reminder that all power corrupts?but we've heard that before and more succinctly elsewhere. The author is the former editor-in-chief of Omni magazine. Most libraries can safely pass on this one.?Elsa Pendleton, Boeing Information Svcs., Inc., Ridgecrest, Cal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.