"Bible Girl" Julie Lyons has her first book out--called Holy Roller. I got to know her through her husband, Larry, who was in my first preaching class with me. (When I spoke, we called it "emphatic sharing.") For years Julie served as editor of the Dallas alternative weekly paper, The Dallas Observer, where she specialized in investigative reporting. The girl can write and has racked up a case full of awards. She has often come to speak to my journalism class about her experiences. And I was so fascinated with her testimony that I wrote a fictionalized version of it in my novel, False Positive. Here's a little sampling from Holy Roller:

"I was driving on the wild frontier of gangsta-land, a place I'd learn to navigate by the sites where people got murdered. South Dallas always stayed crazy, and I was just getting used to the experience—the occasional kak-kak-kak of semiautomatic-weapon fire, the graffiti tags of the Trey-Five-Seven (.357) Crips, the distinctive choreography of drug dealing, with crack passing invisibly from hand to hand in furtive motions that I came to recognize from afar.

I was twenty-seven years old, white, and quite conspicuous in black South Dallas the evening in late April 1990 when I set out to find a different kind of story for the Dallas Times Herald. Since starting a job two months earlier as a crime reporter, I'd been getting to know the roughest parts of the city, places like this. It was nothing like the small Wisconsin town where I grew up.

I'd tell myself I wasn't scared, but I think I was driving too fast to know for sure. This time I wasn't chasing flashing lights toward Bexar Street, hoping to get there before the witnesses and walking wounded had melted away in the dark. Instead, I was looking for the scene of a miracle.

You can read an interview with Julie here .

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