Samai Collins is an active church-going stay-at-home mother, married to an abusive minister. When they divorce, and she is left to raise their two children as well as the daughter she had out of wedlock, she struggles with being alone. In her struggle, she reconnects with an old friend from high school, one that she secretly had a crush on. Despite the voice within that consistently tries to warn Samai away from people and situations that are only to her detriment, Samai, who led a relatively sheltered life, decides to explore some of life's seedier avenues. In her explorations, her life quickly spirals downward, as she becomes a drug-addicted, welfare mother. However, the voice within never leaves her, nor does the voice of God. NEVER AS GOOD AS THE FIRST TIME chronicles Samai's descent into the abyss and her rise from the ashes.

In her debut novel, Mari Walker takes the reader deep into life in the early 1980's when cocaine was king, only to be displaced by the more virulent crack. She examines how easy it might be for a steady churchgoer to make some very bad decisions and the difficulty of climbing out of the gutter into which those decisions plunge her. At the same time, Ms. Walker renders a bit of an indictment of the church, in that church members seem to hardly notice Samai's absence when she falls away and take little or no action to find out what's going on with a woman who was not only a regular attendee but also the wife of one of their ministers. At the same, it was pleasing that Samai found the help that she ultimately needed by returning to her faith.

NEVER AS GOOD AS THE FIRST TIME is a gritty, seamy, no- holds-barred tale of destruction and redemption. This story grabs hold of the reader and doesn't let go until the last word, in part because of curiosity as to just how far Samai will fall and in part because the reader is hanging on to see whether Samai will be saved.