Few expect a Lutheran pastor to write a book like this.
The Rev. Dr. Christopher I. Thoma, a local author and clergyman, shatters assumptions with his new novel “Ashes to Ashes” —a tense, morally charged vigilante thriller set across the streets and backroads of Linden and Fenton, Mich., as well as sites in Livingston County.
Readers familiar with the area will find themselves standing in the story’s shadow. Yet the towns’ quiet streets hide something darker.
The book unfolds when the Rev. Daniel Michaels, a local pastor haunted by the death of a parishioner, discovers a web of violence and corruption beneath small-town calm, and then he must decide whether to pray for justice — or deliver it himself. The result is a novel that’s not for the faint of heart. Readers will be where the Rev. Daniel Michaels is. They’ll descend with him into holy violence. They’ll see what he sees and feel what he feels. Readers will know every last detail, each leading toward the narrative’s eventual terminus, the pages burning along the way with action, inner conflict, and moral ambiguity. One scene sees the Reverend locked in brutal hand-to-hand combat — ending with a whispered liturgy over a smoking Colt 1911: “You’ll answer for every girl… Kyrie eleison.” Later, standing by a fire pit behind his Linden home, he drops his blood-soakedclerical shirt into the flames and mutters the words that give the book its title: “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.”
“Ashes to Ashes” dares to ask what happens when faith collides with fury—and what remains of grace when a man of God decides that waiting for divine justice takes too long.
Local roots, moral depth: Thoma’s background in ministry gives authenticity to every interaction, every moral dilemma, every whispered prayer in the dark. Yet the story’s intensity and cinematic realism make it read like a noir crime film set in Genesee County.
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