WorksNowhere-Land
After a Jehovah’s Witness girl is abducted in conjunction with a ritualistic triple homicide in the mountains outside of Los Angeles, the church engages cult specialist Stephan Raszer to track her. Based on evidence that the girl may have been trafficked into a sex and terrorism ring with a Middle Eastern nexus, Raszer soon unveils an inside-out reality that begins on the Web and ends in a fabled fortress on the borderlands of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, where a powerful figure known only as the Old Man of the Mountains holds the strings. "Hill has written an astute thriller, focused on religions and cults and the way they’ve been used to master civilizations. But Nowhere-Land is also about what might be called the very new cults of Internet game playing, and how role-playing games move from the Web to the real world, from “make-believe” to more chaotic fictions that can spawn terror when dark minds gain control. In Nowhere-Land, the world feels like it’s in a pre-Apocalyptic state: There’s a war on for its soul. You could say it’s a story of our time." --Judith Freeman, author of The Long Embrace (L.A. Weekly) The Last Days Of Madame Rey
Sleuth, scholar, shaman: A.W. Hill’s hero Stephan Raszer is no ordinary private eye, which explains why crime fiction master Ian Rankin has dubbed him "a James Bond for the spiritually uncertain 21st century." And why the Los Angeles Times pronounced Raszer’s darkness-in-daylight world one filled with “twists, turns, thrills and turbulence.” “The Last Days of Madame Rey is an eruption of a book that is quite likely to take up a sort of illicit residence in your skull.” --David Freeman, author of The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock “From the bedrooms of Hollywood to the gates of death, psychic sleuth Stephan Raszer stalks both a killer and a conspiracy through the occult lizard-brain of uppermost California's secret spaces. A. W. Hill has given us a real brain-kick of a book." --Sarah Smith, author of The Knowledge of Water Enoch’s Portal
Novelist A.W. Hill has drawn on the threads of the infamous Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate cult suicides to fashion a visionary detective yarn, which involves a five continent treasure hunt for spiritual truth as old as the Pyramids. Steeped in history but as current as tomorrow’s headlines, Enoch’s Portal ventures down one dark alley after another, knitting together intrigues as outwardly unrelated as the Swiss Bank scandal, the Masonic conspiracy and the Knights Templar. "In his debut novel, Hill takes a daring leap into an unknown world as dark and scary as any faced by his protagonist: the genre-bending occult/detective/thriller novel. Stephan Raszer, cult-busting private eye, comes on like a cross between Mike Hammer and Fox Mulder. Not content with smoky stakeouts and beating leads out of informants, Raszer is a new kind of gumshoe for a New Age. He knows that behind every religious con there lurks the possibility of real forces with real powers to be reckoned with. We follow the shamanic shamus to Prague, where he is trying to rescue a Hollywood wife before she commits suicide in a bizarre death-cult ritual. Will he discover what's really going on before it's too late? Hill's swift and nimble prose falls like poetry on the mind's ear, and he drops enough occult references to induce just about anyone into picking up a sacred text and doing some sleuthing of their own." -- Book Soup Reviews, Book Soup on Sunset, West Hollywood, CA "The Grotto"
Prize-winning story featured in The Absinthe Literary Review, summer/fall 2004. Exile In Godville: Profile of a Postmodern Heretic
Cover Story, L.A. Weekly, May 2005. |
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