An Allegory

You can read Crossing the Line perfectly well as a straight crime story: drugs, desperation, bad decisions, people in way over their heads.

But if you know the Gospel story, there’s a point where the book starts to feel… oddly familiar. Not because it’s full of sermons or halos, but because its shape quietly follows the story of Christ’s betrayal, from the wilderness right through to Easter.

At the centre is Jed. He’s not a gentle, stained-glass-window Christ, but he is the man the whole story turns around: the way he can talk, persuade, gather people, bend the atmosphere in a room. People project things onto him, follow him, fear him, resent him; he draws out what’s hidden in them. That’s classic Christ-figure territory.

The Drugs as “God”

Then there are the drugs. In this allegory they’re not just a plot device, they stand in for God – or at least Jed’s experience of God:

• They “choose” him, in a sense: he stumbles on them the way Christ is “driven” into the wilderness.
• They fire him up, give him purpose, a sense of destiny, a mission.
• They are powerful, dangerous, larger than his own life – and demand everything from him.

For Jed, the drugs become his burning bush, his Spirit, his call. They’re what he serves, defends, preaches around – and in the end, what causes his downfall.

From Wilderness to Betrayal

Crucially, the book’s timeline doesn’t start in the final week. It begins earlier, with that key moment when Jed finds the drugs. Before Palm Sunday, before Gethsemane, before the trial, Christ disappears into the desert for forty days: stripped back, tempted, forged.

In Crossing the Line, Jed’s discovery of the stash is the equivalent. It’s the moment when an ordinary life is suddenly pulled into something bigger, stranger, and far more dangerous.

From there, the story tracks the same emotional arc as the Gospels until his betrayal, his figurative “crucifixion”, and his final “resurrection”.

Spotting the Parallels

Readers of Crossing the Line can’t help but try and put together the pieces of the story. To which biblical figures do the main characters correspond? How does the timeline match the last weeks of Christ’s life?

Some parallels are obvious. Others are loose, suggestive, or inverted. The idea isn’t to create a one-to-one map, but to let the crime story echo against the Gospel story in a way that raises questions about sacrifice, loyalty, power, forgiveness – and what it costs to “save” anyone.

Two Ways to Read It

Whichever way you read Crossing the Line, it’s a story that you simply can’t put down. You can take it purely as a gripping tale of drugs, politics and corruption – or you can let the echoes of an older story deepen the way you see Jed’s rise and fall.

Either way, the question is the same: when someone crosses the line for us, what do we do with them?

— Peter Mullin