EYE OF GOD

A pair of Orange County investigators tackles the case of a faith healer’s leaky tent.

Al Hasp is floored when Norm Carpenter, the brains of PI firm Hasp and Carpenter, announces that he’s resigning because he’s given his life to Jesus. Desperate to keep Norm on board, Al accepts evangelist Vincent Majors’s request to identify the traitor who’s passed embarrassing information about his ministry to muckraking journalist James Morales and Prof. Elmer Thaxter, head of the Federation of Atheists, Irreligionists and Realists (FAIR). The Judas is so well-informed that he must be in Majors’s inner circle, which includes trophy wife Vanessa, chief administrator Carl Willoughby, press liaison Don Foster, lead musician Steve Ludecker or tech head Joe Aspen. Not content to slip Norm undercover into this crowd, whose hypocrisy will surely turn him off, Al follows a trail that leads from Majors’s daughter, Helga Barnabas, to Sonrise College, where she was educated and impregnated, and the Anaheim Rafters, the new pro basketball team whose owners include Helga’s husband, player/coach Abner Barnabas, and mob-connected Gilly Frisco, who snuggled up to the unwilling Helga but won’t let anybody snuggle up to him. Three sinners will pay the ultimate price before Al finds out whether he’s rescued Norm from being saved.

Breen (stories: The Drowning Icecube, 1999, etc.) lets his great premise—a couple of private eyes divided by religion—peter out with forgettable characters and generic revelations.