The Unfinished Man

a novel by Jim Wayne (2016)
$22 hardcover

Finalist in the RELIGIOUS FICTION Category of the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards (NGIBA). 

In Father Justin Zapp, Jim Wayne has created a complex man of religious devotion who struggles with a traumatic past, his vision of what is good and true, and a commitment, despite all, to seeing justice served. In the heart and soul of Zapp, beautifully limned by Wayne, we enter an “unfinished man’s troubled and inspiring journey of faith as he speaks truth to power and seeks to become whole.

– Roy Hoffman, author of the novels Chicken Dreaming Corn and Come Landfall

Jim Wayne gives his readers a psychologically astute window into the ecclesiastical mindset that unwittingly has abetted clergy sexual abuse of children and teens. The Unfinished Man takes us into the highest corridors of the Vatican at the start of the Second Vatican Council long before the abuse scandals made world headlines. Here moral courage and raw careerism clash in a story of grace and corruption—and a misguided notion of what is “for the good of the church.”

– Donald Cozzens, author of Master of Ceremonies and Notes from the Underground: The Spiritual Journal of a Secular Priest