Article 7 - D.L. Gray - Brock W. Winters Book 1

ARTICLE 7

Brock H. Winters Book 1

D. L. Gray

Saint Dominic’s Media

ISBN 9798997268510

ASIN B0HJB31L3X

Wow! This book took me completely by surprise! Over the last decade I have averaged reading about a book a day, and this is one of the best debut novels, if not one of the best novels I have read! I was approached about reading this because I had reviewed books on Meister Eckhart and Columbo back to back. I was intrigued by the cover, and the short description, which states:

“A claims adjuster stops coming to work. His phone goes dead. The address in his personnel file is a street number that does not exist. By Wednesday, his employer has filed a police report, reassigned his claims, and put a temp in his cubicle.

One coworker thinks that is strange. Nobody else does. Her name is Erin West, and she brings it to Brock H. Winters, the only licensed investigator who serves her parish.”

We are informed about Brock:

“Known as ‘The Deacon’ by the Cleveland Police Department. A convicted felon. A licensed private investigator. A man vowed to religious life as a Brother. Brock H. Winters did thirty-eight months for embezzlement and earned his license after prison. He works missing persons cases because he was once a man nobody looked for.”

We are also informed that Article 7, of the Rule of the Dominican Brothers of Saint Joseph states:

“Let each brother hold the orphan as a child of his own body, and love him so. It shall cost him nothing, save that he never again set himself above the child.”

We are also informed that the rules will be assembled one book at a time, and are beginning with the above rule 7. The series is planned for 13 volumes, and I have to state that after this first volume, you will absolutely be desperate for the next. I have seen other authors attempt a grand series or numerous books, and the story never made it to completion. I have a feeling, and a hope, and maybe a prayer that Gray sees this through. If there were all available now I would pick up the whole series! But back to the volume at hand.

The story is written as Brock narrates his own journals or ledgers. He wants to be clear, factual, and concise. We know he is an ex-con, we soon realize he has been pardoned but does not pardon himself. He lives by ritual and routine. He is a sacristarian, the person who sets up before mass, and cleans up after, specifically at St. Joseph’s. He is a person who carries the weight, the weight of his own past. The weight of those at his parish, the weight of his ex-wife and children. And the weight of those he tries to help. He notices things, things other people do now. He sees the patterns, adjusts the ledgers. He notices what is missing and what has been added. And He almost misses the most important clues. 

Brock is the type of guy you would want in your corner, and definitely looking for you if you were missing. The story is set in Cleveland. Once He pulls the sting on a missing person he cannot let go. He soon finds echoes from his own past and he needs to determine of the false notes he is noticing are for protection or for harm. He cannot let go, even after he is offered an easy out. 

I seldom highlight when reading fiction, but this story kept grabbing my attention. I shared quotes with friends and highlighted a lot. Some of those highlights are:

“People come to seven o’clock Mass for the same basic reason they come to a private detective. Something has gone missing, and they’ve run out of places to look.”

“They never have. They’re doing the same job at different pay scales, and only one of them has a pension, and it isn’t the one you’d guess.”

“The neighborhood that filled these pews is three neighborhoods ago, now. What remains is a building too big for its congregation and too holy to sell—the way certain men are—and I unlock it every morning like a watchman handing a bank back to daylight, and I have never once turned that key without thinking of men who hauled ore all day and then came here at night to lay stone for free, for God, with their backs. The least I can do is show up at six with a key.”

“Like the building healed over him. People hand you the title of the case in the first conversation if you let them talk. They always do. Write that down somewhere if you’re ever in my line of work, either line.”

“I’m a professed brother of the Dominican Brothers of Saint Joseph: a lay apostolate of penitents, founded in Spain seven centuries ago to guard women, widows, and orphans, and re-founded every generation by men like me who needed guarding first.”

“But I can tell you exactly what it does to a man, being unlooked-for. It’s not the bars. A man can make his peace with bars; they’re honest, at least, about what they are.”

“Every life in America throws a paper shadow. You can’t help it. You rent, you borrow, you get sick, you get towed, you subscribe to something and forget to cancel it. And each one of those ordinary sins leaves a mark on a page somewhere, and the marks accumulate, and by the time you’re forty, the shadow is longer than you are. Most people never think about it. A skip-tracer thinks about nothing else. I don’t find people, not really. I find shadows, and then I walk to the end of them, and there the person is, blinking up at me, wondering how.”

“I say felon about myself the way I say forgiven—both true, both permanent, both somebody else’s doing.”

“He took another bite, unhurried, and looked out over the emptying canyon, and for a moment we just stood there, the spy and the sacristan, two men who had between us that afternoon saved a woman neither of us voted for and a city full of people who would never know either of our names, eating a sandwich and not eating a sandwich in the long gold Cleveland light.” 

Some fiction you read and it was entertaining, some are informative, some are transforming. This is that third type. It has left me thinking for several days. It prompted me to pray. It inspired and it has challenged. In some ways it feels like Jesse Stone by Robert B. Parker, but if Parker or Stone had kept their faith and made it central. It is a slow burn, but the story burns hot and the embers take a long time smouldering down.

While researching for this review I discovered that Gray publishes non-fiction under the full version of his name. A few of those titles grabbed my attention as well. I plan on picking up a few to read. And I will absolutely pick up future books in this series or any other fiction he publishes. This is an excellent read, and a fantastic beginning in what looks to be an amazing series!

Note: This book is part of a series of reviews: 2026 Catholic Reading Plan!

Books by D.L. Gray:

Brock H. Winters Series:

Article 7

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Books as David L. Gray:

Artificial Intelligence Proves Catholicism is True

Cooperating with God: Life with the Cross

Cooperating with God: The Bridegroom's Prayer

Dead on Arrival: The Seven Fatal Errors of Sola-Scriptura

Inside Prince Hall

Jesus Christ Loves You

The Catholic Catechism on Freemasonry

The Divine Symphony: An Exordium to the Theology of the Catholic Mass

The Liturgical Sense of the Readings at Mass (Year A)

Compendium of the Catholic Catechism on Freemasonry

Return to the Sacred: Dispelling the Darkness in the World

Catholic, Traditional & Black: In Anthology and Discourse

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