Dallas and the Spitfire: An Old Car, an Ex-Con, and an Unlikely Friendship

Kluck, an award-winning author (Why We Love the Church), teams with an ex-con he is mentoring in this odd-couple Same Kind of Different as Me feel-alike. The two men decide to fix up a vintage Triumph Spitfire in order to bond as Christian men. “I suck at working on cars. In fact, check that, I’ve never worked on a car,” Kluck writes. But Jahncke has, and so the book chronicles how they buy a broken-down sports car and bring it roaring back to life over a year of friendship, trials, and triumphs of their own. Jahncke is new to writing, but the tattooed ex-con recovering addict writes vividly (“If you have ever romanced coke yourself, you know she’s a high maintenance girl”), but also more reverently than Kluck, whose cheeky banter comes with footnotes used to squirrel away humor. The book is less about a car than about the lasting friendship that forms between the men. Despite a few flaws, the authors have put together a triumph. Agent: Andrew Wolgemuth. (Apr.)