God Is a Bullet

The feral wasteland of the southern California desert and the badlands of Mexico: these are the settings for Boston Teran's searing debut novel--a dark, wrenching thriller about personal conviction, retribution, and survival. Fall 1970. In a remote playa a twelve-year-old boy stumbles upon a hideous scene in a dust-strewn trailer: the savage murder of a woman that will remain unsolved for twenty-five years. Christmas week, 1995. A fourteen-year-old girl is kidnapped by a bloodthirsty...
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The feral wasteland of the southern California desert and the badlands of Mexico: these are the settings for Boston Teran's searing debut novel--a dark, wrenching thriller about personal conviction, retribution, and survival. Fall 1970. In a remote playa a twelve-year-old boy stumbles upon a hideous scene in a dust-strewn trailer: the savage murder of a woman that will remain unsolved for twenty-five years. Christmas week, 1995. A fourteen-year-old girl is kidnapped by a bloodthirsty satanic cult that calls itself the Left-Handed Path. The leader, Cyrus, considers murder the "ultimate freedom, ultimate joy . . . ultimate service." His "tribe" is a group of drug-fueled young psychopaths honing their skills under the tutelage of a master. Helter Skelter. And then some. Bob Hightower, the girl's father, is a cop, suddenly more desperate than he ever imagined possible. There are no clues to his daughter's whereabouts, only a scene of unfathomable carnage--the mutilated corpses of her mother and stepfather--left behind by the kidnappers. His only hope is a fierce ex-cult member named Case Hardin, a woman tempered to an extraordinary strength by what she's endured, who's just getting off the junkie trail in a halfway house in Hollywood. Bob has absolutely no reason, and every need, to trust her. Case suspects that the killings, committed within fifty miles of each other and separated by a quarter of a century, are part of a byzantine nightmare she knows too well, a nightmare that has now engulfed Bob's daughter. Their quest--he for his child, she to exorcise her demons--becomes a primal hunt-and-chase through a savage subculture of drugs and ritualistic violence ("the black land of plenty") that takes them inexorably toward the limits of physical and psychological torment and trauma. God Is a Bullet is an indelible story of people who must discover what it means to surrender oneself completely--to drugs, or power, or faith, or love--and, when necessary, what it takes to come back. It is a stunning debut.