Review: A thriller novel with a theological twist

What would you do if your toddler started glowing? 

This isn’t a riddle. It’s the premise of Robert P. Baird’s startling debut novel The Nimbus, which begins with exactly this scenario and proceeds to unpack everything we think we know about faith, sight and the stories we tell ourselves. A child named Luca emits a soft, inexplicable light that some people can see and others cannot. His mother, heartbreakingly, is among those who see nothing at all.

If this sounds like science fiction, think again. Baird has written something far stranger: a campus novel that doubles as a theological thriller, a domestic drama that questions the very nature of reality. Set in a university divinity school, The Nimbus asks what happens when the miraculous intrudes on the mundane, when the thing you’ve spent your life studying suddenly shows up in your living room, glowing.

Universities, with their pride in rational inquiry, become inadvertently comic in The Nimbus. The writers studied by Luca’s father, Adrian, parcel out Luca’s inexplicable glow into typologies—Zoroastrian khvarenah! prophetic aureolas!—only to find themselves patterning meaning out of what defies categorization. Yet Baird shows them as human attempts to hold the chaos at bay.

In John 20:29, Jesus offers a paradoxical blessing: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Baird’s novel recasts that maxim in a secular age, asking whether belief requires proof. Thomas, you will remember, was the Apostle who needed to touch Christ’s wounds to believe in the resurrection. He got his proof (lucky him). The rest of us make do with stories, with partial glimpses, with the unsettling possibility that the miraculous might be real but visible only to some. Baird’s modern Thomas is anyone who encounters Luca’s nimbus: the doctors who run every test imaginable only to find that, as one physician puts it, “Nothing registers.” The religious scholars who scramble to contextualize the inexplicable. The believers, who believe Luca has been imbued with powers straight from God, and the skeptical journalists, who think this all must be an elaborate hoax. 

The uneven distribution of the nimbus—who can see it and who can’t—becomes a testing ground for questions of spiritual privilege and cultural capital. Baird refuses to provide easy answers, instead using the nimbus as a lens through which to examine how we construct meaning in an age that demands evidence for everything. Who gets access to wonder? Who is excluded from the very experiences that might make existence bearable?

The novel’s most moving passages explore these questions through the lens of parenthood. Renata, Luca’s mother, faces an impossible choice: believe in something she cannot see or accept that she might be blind to her own child’s essence. How do you mother a miracle you cannot perceive? How do you anchor your love in absence of proof?

Meanwhile, Adrian, Luca’s father, seems willing to exploit his son’s supernatural glow—if not directly to the media camped outside their house, then at least by refusing to keep it private. Reddit users claim to have seen the nimbus and been healed; Adrian does not discourage the attention. This creates devastating tension in his marriage with Renata, who wonders if everyone else has lost their minds. Baird suggests that all parenting is an act of faith, requiring us to believe in realities we cannot fully grasp or control.

But The Nimbus isn’t content to explore faith in the abstract. Baird grounds his inquiry in contemporary anxieties, where traditional authority has crumbled and people cobble together meaning from whatever materials they can find. We see this in Paul Harkin, Adrian’s graduate student, whose rootlessness has led him to religious studies not because he believes in God but because he needs to believe in something. As Baird writes, Paul has discovered that “what the practice of religion had done for his mother, the study of religion had done for Paul.” Both offer “a thread, however slender, however fragile, that helped him find his way out of his drifting isolation.”

This insight cuts to the heart of what makes The Nimbus so compelling. Paul’s turn to academic theology isn’t about finding divine truth but about organizing experience, feeling connected to something larger than his own uncertainty. “Religion was culture. Religion was history,” he realizes—a way to “reach across continents and centuries, to feel like he was part of something durable.”

The novel’s academic setting provides both comic relief and philosophical depth. When Adrian suggests Paul write about “people who shine,” Paul discovers that “there was a whole long history of people glowing…. The glow showed up everywhere, in just about every significant religious tradition you could think of.” Soon Luca’s nimbus is transformed from lived mystery into scholarly commodity, something that can help a Ph.D. student write a dissertation or a former Div School student strike a bargain with the devil, or at least a dangerous loan shark who believes in miracles.

The tension emerges from this mismatch between experience and analysis, between the thing itself and our attempts to explain it away. Academic institutions end up circling their own jargon, creating elaborate theoretical frameworks that miss the point entirely. Yet Baird reveals them as touchingly human attempts to make sense of an incomprehensible world.

The novel’s tragicomic tone acknowledges both the absurdity and necessity of such meaning-making. As Baird writes, “the bad answers were also, in their way, beside the point. As long as there was longing there would be disappointment. As long as there was love there would be heartbreak. As long as there was life there would be death.” This isn’t cynicism but realism—an acknowledgment that the search for meaning persists because we’re human, and humans need more than facts to survive.

The genius of The Nimbus lies in its refusal to solve the mystery it presents. We never learn why Luca glows, never discover the scientific explanation that would make everyone comfortable. This isn’t narrative failure but philosophical triumph. In a world where “nothing registers” on our instruments, belief becomes an act of interpretation, a choice about how to orient ourselves toward uncertainty.

Baird’s prose is elegant and precise, marked by the careful attention to language one might expect from a former editor at The New Yorker or Harper’s. His satire of academic pretension is affectionate rather than cruel.

The Nimbus arrives at a moment when American culture is grappling with questions of truth, authority and meaning. What makes Baird’s contribution so valuable is his refusal to choose sides in the battles between reason and faith, skepticism and belief. 

Like the Thomas story it echoes, The Nimbus asks what kind of faith is possible without proof. But unlike Thomas, we don’t get to touch the wounds. We must make do with glimpses, with stories, with the possibility that the miraculous might be real but visible only to some. The novel’s final insight is both humbling and hopeful: In our age of data and evidence, belief persists not because we’re irrational but because we are humans who need more than facts to make existence bearable.

The Nimbus makes a quiet yet profound argument, that mystery is not a flaw in the fabric of faith but a feature. Some truths flicker just beyond our grasp, and our capacity to look becomes the measure of our humanity. It is a novel that trusts its readers to sit with uncertainty, to find meaning in the questions rather than rushing toward answers. 

Baird has written a beautiful argument for the necessity of mystery, a reminder that some truths can only be glimpsed, never grasped. Whether you see the glow or not, you’ll find yourself changed by the looking.

This article appears in October 2025.

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