Purdy loses DeBoer during one trip and catches up with him at the festival and spends a few days with him before he gets ready to leave for home to handle the release of his book. I’ll leave it to the reader to read what happens there.

In his debut novel, Needham does a bang up job bringing his characters to life. The dialogue flows so naturally, it makes you feel part of the conversation. The long paragraphs of description, which led from one page to the next, along with the need to know why Purdy would let DeBoer get away with plagiarizing his father’s book, kept me reading to the end.

An Inverted Sort of Prayer takes you on a tour of civilized and uncivilized behavior, and Needham’s writing will have you feeling the frustration and failures of his characters. It’s worth reading to the twisted end, even if you’re not a fan of hockey, alcohol, drugs, and sex.

Needham has written six novels, of which An Inverted Sort of Prayer is number four, but this is his first published novel. Needham says, “the first three are very, very bad and, if we’re at all lucky, shall never see the light of day.”

Chris Needham is working on book number seven, under the working title Fonduing with the Feldmans. The final draft of Needham’s second published novel, Falling from Heights, is due out in Spring 2007.