Apparent Danger by David Stokes (March 2010)

A Preacher and A Killer
Review by Kim Cantrell

The historical true crime authors are knocking them out of the ballpark these days. 

And I am loving it!

Today I want to introduce to a recent release from David Stokes titled Apparent Danger: The Pastor of America’s First Megachurch and the Texas Murder Trial of the Decade in the 1920s.

Stokes – a minister, broadcaster, and author – takes us back in to the 1920s; a time when a America’s eye was on the Scopes trial taking place in Dayton, Tennessee.

 And J. Frank Norris would find all eyes on him as the Paster of America’s first megachurch (10,000+ congregants) and the State of Texas as he stood trial for murdering a critic.

With a pleasant, narrative style writing, Stokes offers not a biography of Norris but of the events that led up to his trial.

Apparent Danger offers a historical blend of murder, arson, and other sinister deeds, neatly tied into the fanatical Fundamentalist and the Klu Klux Klan, and topped off with long past, but long remembered icons such as William Jennings Bryan and Byron Nelson.

If you have even just an inkling of interest in antiquated crime, you’ll want to read David Stokes’ Apparent Danger…because Stokes has a way of bringing the past to the present without the doldrum of a history book.