Then I happened upon the 1990 Avenel edition of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Crime Stories in a dusty old bookstore in Atlanta the year I graduated from theology college and was ordained, and it was nothing less than serendipitous. During that momentous year of transition, as I was being born into my adult life, Chesterton in many ways became my literary father, and Brown the fictional father to my ecclesiastical sleuth, John Jordan.

Between 1988 and 1994, I attempted on and off to write short stories and screenplays, but it wouldn’t be until the summer of ’94, as I was finishing my graduate degree in theology and about to enter into full-time prison chaplaincy, that I became a writer. That summer, in an upstairs room at my parents’ house I converted into my library and study because my small home didn’t have room for them, in the semi-coolness provided by the inefficient window unit, after a long and drawn-out delivery, a writer was born. John Jordan was born. This book was born.

It was during this time that I discovered other crime writers who have had a profound influence on my work, like James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly (who has contributed an essay for this book). It was also during this time that I attended my first novel-writing workshop taught by Lynn Wallace (who has also contributed an essay for this book).

And because way leads to way and book leads to book, I began a kind of self-designed curriculum for my education as a new writer, which included Shakespeare, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Chandler, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Updike, Roth, Irving, DeLillo, Fitzgerald, and Cormac McCarthy.

Over the next twenty-plus years, I continued my education and training, and after some thirty books, thirteen of which are John Jordan novels, here I am.

I feel like somewhere along the way I learned to write some, and I hope twenty years from now I’ll have learned a lot more.

At some point during the past twenty years since Power in the Blood was first published, probably back around the time I learned a little about writing, I began wanting to rewrite it. I’ve thought about it for years, but was uncertain as to how to approach it or when to take the time away from current and future books to do it. And then a couple of years back it occurred to me that the twentieth anniversary of the book would be the perfect time.

The moment I decided to rewrite Power in the Blood for this special edition, I had to decide exactly what that meant. Was I going to toss out the original and start over? Was I going to keep the original and just tweak and lightly edit? Was I going to change the story? The plot? The style?

Ultimately, I chose to keep the original book, but do heavy revision without changing the essential plot and characters in any fundamental way.