Author Denise Giardina said in a brief interview during a visit to Mt. Airy that she was in "a spiritual desert" some six years ago when she started intensive research and writing for her award-winning historical novel, Saints and Villains (W.W. Norton), about German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

"The research and work on my book really reinvigorated my faith," Giardina said during a reading and book-signing event at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. The reinvigoration has culminated in Giardina's serving on the vestry of St. John's Episcopal Church in Charleston, WV, and as a licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia.

Speaking during the annual open house of the Bonhoeffer Center at the Seminary, Giardina discussed and read from her new work. The book is the outcome of a 20-year fascination with Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis at the end of World War II because of his resistance activities.

Giardina, who teaches at West Virginia State College, said her half-dozen years of intensive research were crucial to the writing of her book, but said she is also "a compulsive, unrepentant storyteller." A novel approach enables an author to use "composite characters" rather than a longer list of real life characters.

"A story like this should be interesting enough so that if you read it by a campfire the hair on your neck will stand up," Giardina said. "We may use a story like this to ask questions about human beings of that time and what they mean to us today. What does moral courage demand of us?" She said Bonhoeffer was a complex and fascinating human being, "a kind of everyman…"

Kirkus Review calls Saints and Villains "a triumphant portrayal of one of the century's authentic heroes." Its depiction of Bonhoeffer's undercover work against the Hitler regime "packs the excitement of a spy novel," said reviewer Hans Knight in his February Philadelphia Inquirer book review.

The Seminary's Bonhoeffer Center is the headquarters for the development of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition (Augsburg Fortress), slated for completion in 2004. On hand for Giardina's presentation were Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr., general editor and director of the project; Clifford J. Green, executive director of the project, and Professor Geffrey Kelly of La Salle University, president of the International Bonhoeffer Society.