The visitation

I can't review a Peretti novel without dragging out my dusty copy of his last book and giving you a quick rundown.

The Visitation happens in a little eastern Washington town called Antioch, where nothing ever happens. Overnight, it became the centre of the supernatural - with sighting of angels, messianic images in the sky and a weeping crucifix that heals.

But that's only the beginning. A self-proclaimed prophet appears at a local ranch and the people of Antioch accepted him as the Messiah of the second coming of Christ.

This turned out to be very good for Antioch when the visitation gives the town a booming industry in religious tourism. Everyone is happy but for one Travis Jordan, a burnt-out former pastor who came to Antioch to run away from his past. What happened to Antioch made Travis confront his past and work on uncovering the truth behind what is going happening.

Now the trap behind Christian thrillers, supernatural or not, is that someone out there will decry the entire thing as misleading and dangerously speculative. That's why it's called ‘fiction', duh. If books like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code or Tim LaHaye & Jerry B. Jenkins's Left Behind series poses a threat to your faith, then my warning label for this week is to stick to the non-fiction works that inspired novels of this genre.

(2005)