Plain Heathen Mischief

Of *The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living,* Martin Clark’s first novel, the *New York Times Book Review* wrote, “Like Nick Hornby in *High Fidelity* and Thomas McGuane in *Nothing But Blue Skies,* Clark has produced an oddly stirring portrait of a man in existential disarray.” Which–noted Malcolm Jones in *Newsweek–*“made me laugh so hard I fell off the sofa.”

*Plain Heathen Mischief* ups the existential ante, as Joel King, a defrocked Baptist minister, finds life even more bedeviling once he’s served six months for a career-ending crime he might not even have committed. Now his incommunicado wife wants a divorce, the teenage vixen of his disgrace is suing him for a cool $5 million, a fresh start in Montana offers no hope for ex-cons of any religious persuasion, and the refuge provided by his sister turns as nasty as his parole officer.

Talk about a crisis of faith. On the upside, a solicitous member of Joel’s former congregation invites him into a scam that could yield some desperately needed cash, and soon the down-on-his-luck preacher is involved with a flock of charming con men, crooked lawyers, and conniving youth.

In a feat of bravura storytelling, Martin Clark ranges from the cross to the double cross, from Virginia to Las Vegas, from jail cells to trout streams, as he follows his Job-like hero through dubious choices and high-dollar insurance hustles to a redemption that no reader could possibly predict. Wildly imaginative, at times comic, at times profoundly sobering, and even more audacious than his wonderfully idiosyncratic debut, *Plain Heathen Mischief* is a spiritual revelation of the first order.