Sister, Sinner

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year
A Must-Read: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Millions, Alta

Long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography

“Magnificent.” —Casey Cep, The New Yorker

Sister, Sinner chronicles the dramatic rise, disappearance, and near-fall of Aimee Semple McPherson, America’s most famous woman evangelist.

On a spring day, Aimee Semple McPherson wandered into the Pacific Ocean and vanished. Weeks later she reappeared in the desert, claiming to have been kidnapped. The story of what happened next—sex scandals, religious persecution, legal shenanigans, the seemingly unshakable faith of thousands of followers, and the race by the media to cover it all—runs through the center of Claire Hoffman’s thrilling Sister, Sinner.

America’s most famous evangelist, McPherson was a sophisticated marketer who used spectacle, storytelling, and the newest technology to bring God’s message to the masses. Her innovations brought Pentecostalism into the mainstream, paved the way for televangelists, and shaped the future of American Christianity. But after her disappearance, people asked: Was McPherson everybody’s saintly sister, or a con-artist sinner?

A riveting journey into the rise of popular religion in America and life in early Hollywood, and told with the flavor of the period’s noir mysteries, this is an unforgettable story of an iconic woman, largely overlooked, who changed the world.