A.W. Hill


Selected Works

Detective Fiction/Fantasy
The Last Days Of Madame Rey
"Stephan Raszer is a hero in the grand lineage of sleuths with a taste for the esoteric, who rely on unexpected allies and more than the usual five senses as they dare to tackle extraordinary crimes."
--Otto Penzler, founder of The Mysterious Bookshop
Enoch’s Portal
"Dollops of humour and horror and eroticism, a good solid conspiracy, and a hero who is a James Bond for the spiritually uncertain 21st century. Reads like Ludlum by way of Thomas Pynchon!"
--Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus novels
"A fast-paced narrative full of twists, turns, thrills and turbulence. Whether you believe or simply choose to belief, it makes for an exhilarating ride."
--Eugen Weber, Los Angeles Times; L.A. Confidential
Exile In Godville: Profile of a Postmodern Heretic
Cover Story, L.A. Weekly, May 2005.
Short Story
"The Grotto"
Featured in The Absinthe Literary Review, summer/fall 2004.
Fiction
Nowhere-Land
L.A. cult investigator Stephan Raszer tracks a kidnapped Jehovah’s Witness girl and discovers a cabal of assassins using an alternate reality game to recruit its footsoldiers.



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Works

Nowhere-Land
After a young member of the Jehovah’s Witness Church 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 perilous trail. 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 is said to hold the strings.

With the dubious aid of the abductee’s wayward sister, along with a renegade CIA agent and a fraternity of sojourning gamesters, Raszer journeys far from the rational world and deep into a dangerous and erotically-charged netherland. Piece by piece, he gathers evidence of a world-altering criminal conspiracy linked to an ancient Persian sect that uses an internet role-playing game to recruit its footsoldiers. To solve the puzzle and find the girl, Stephan Raszer must play the game and try to hold onto his soul and his sanity in a world turned on its head.

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.”


Carroll & Graf, May 2007; ISBN-10: 0-7867-1881-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7867-1881-8

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 myth of the Knights Templar.


Champion Press Ltd. 2002; ISBN: 1-891400-58-4

"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.



SPRING 2009 COUNTERPOINT