In 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson was a bona fide celebrity.

The Canadian evangelist drew throngs to her massive church, Angelus Temple, which still stands in Echo Park, and spread her message even wider via radio.

But McPherson stirred controversy. She ruffled the feathers of local officials from the pulpit and raised eyebrows after growing close to a married employee.

Then, while heading out for an ocean swim near Venice Beach, she vanished.

“It truly feels like Los Angeles lost its mind in the summer of 1926 over it,” says Claire Hoffman on a recent video call.In Hoffman’s new book, “Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson,” the Santa Barbara-based journalist recounts the news frenzy that erupted when McPherson reappeared weeks later in Arizona and investigations were made into claims that she had been kidnapped.

“There were so many strange ripples out that were happening. It’s just one of those things where — oh my gosh— the truth actually is much weirder than fiction,” says Hoffman.

Hoffman says it was her own interest in ocean swimming that brought the story of McPherson’s disappearance to her attention. She had learned about the founder of the Foursquare Church while in divinity school at the University of Chicago.

“I had heard about her there and had seen that she was this important figure in Pentecostalism and 20th-century Christianity, but there wasn’t anything about the kidnapping scandal,” she recalls.

Later, while working at the Los Angeles Times, Hoffman would drive by Angelus Temple nearly every day, and she made note of the building, an early example of an American megachurch.

When those threads of interest came together, Hoffman realized, “OK, I’ve got to dive in.”

“Sister, Sinner” reads like a cross between James Ellroy’s “L.A. Noir” and HBO’s televangelist satire “The Righteous Gemstones” as Hoffman digs into the life of McPherson: her childhood and adolescence in Canada, her rise to prominence as an evangelist, the rift with both her mother and daughter in the years following the disappearance. (On HBO’s now-defunct “Perry Mason” reboot, a character based on McPherson, as played by Tatiana Maslany, provided a juicy storyline in the first season.)

In many ways, McPherson was a precursor to today’s influencers. She relied on radio, the new media of the 1920s, to help spread her message. She had the power to sway large groups. And she loved a good gimmick, such as her “Arrested for Speeding” sermon, in which she dressed up as a traffic cop and rolled onstage on a motorcycle.

Yet, she had a fair share of enemies.

“On one side, you see this female, public figure who is just being absolutely vilified in the press and torn apart in ways that feel unfair and very much related to her gender,” says Hoffman. “On the other side, you see a person with a really different relationship to the truth and who has a manifest reality approach to her life and her ambition and her story.”

That dichotomy was what helped keep Hoffman in pursuit of McPherson’s story. “She wasn’t just a famous, hardworking woman who was the victim of patriarchy,” she says. “She’s also this really ambitious person with an incredible sense of self and maybe even hubris who just saw reality differently.”

Hoffman, whose previous book was the memoir “Greetings From Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood,” says her own upbringing drew her to the subject matter of “Sister, Sinner” as well.

“I grew up in a new age, somewhat Indian, Hindu-oriented faith, but I’ve always been really interested in Pentecostalism,” she says. “It’s a very successful denomination of Protestantism, but it has a lot of this ecstatic worship that you almost see in new age religions, like the one that I was raised in.”

Plus, Hoffman adds, she has an interest in understanding how fringe religious groups become mainstream in the U.S. “I lived it,” she says. “My family was vegetarian and did yoga and meditated, and we were freaks in Iowa. Now, there are yoga gyms.”

Hoffman also notes that her divinity school education and study of belief aided her while writing about McPherson. “I think divinity school helped give me a historical perspective and language on that,” she says. “I believe in belief. So if somebody believes and is experiencing speaking in tongues or a divine healing, I believe in that belief. That’s a perspective that I really value.”

McPherson’s legacy continues today as the Foursquare Church has spread across the globe. “When I tell people that there are 8 million members of The Foursquare Church, they’re shocked,” says Hoffman. “I’m from a tiny town in Iowa. In the middle of working on this book, I was driving to go visit my mom and I drove by a Foursquare Church inside my town. They’re everywhere.”

Ultimately, however, the story in “Sister, Sinner” is a study of the effects of fame as well as religious history.

“It obviously is about religion and a religious figure, but to me, it’s also so much about celebrity,” says Hoffman. “She courted the press. She really wanted all that attention, and then, at some point, it flips and she loses her sense of self and her freedom.

“That’s the cautionary tale of it.”