Nowhere Land

April 13, 2009
Fans of role-playing games will best appreciate Hill's genre-bending third novel to feature L.A. detective-shaman Stephan Raszer (after The Last Days of Madame Rey
). Jehovah's Witness elder Silas Endicott hires Raszer to find his 20-year-old daughter, Katy, abducted by three men in dark business suits after she left an abandoned dance hall high up in a canyon. Raszer probes the twists of fate that led Katy from her life as “the last pure thing” to an enslaved pawn of a modern descendant of the original assassins. From California and New Mexico to the war-torn borderlands where Turkey, Iran and Iraq meet, Raszer relies on both technology and mystic connections to track Katy. In the end, Raszer must figure out how to penetrate an ancient fortress, where the leader known only as the “Old Man” holds sway. Hill's overheated and at times laborious mix of religious arcana and the occult may make this a slog for those expecting a conventional thriller.

May 1, 2009
A Hollywood private eye's search for a missing girl takes him to universes even stranger than Tinseltown.

To say that Stephan Raszer is a tracer of lost persons is to make him sound more generic than he is. Raszer's lost persons have disappeared into the"underworld of cults, cells, and secret fraternities," and it takes a special kind of shamus to trace those"hijacked souls." Though a string of successes (The Last Days of Madame Ray, 2007, etc.) have burnished his sleuthing credentials, Raszer finds himself in a disconcertingly extended period between cases. It's not just the impact on his financial well-being, it's the pessimism fostered by prolonged inactivity. So it's lucky for Raszer when Silas Endicott, a Jehovah's Witness elder, unfolds to him an astonishing and grisly tale of rape and bloody murder, involving young people in his flock as both victims and villains. The latest development is the abduction of Endicott's 20-year-old daughter. Does Raszer think he can retrieve her? It's the kind of challenge he was born for, and of course he hires on, but even he can have little idea of how the journey will test and where it will lead—to faraway places indeed, not all of them real.

Readers drawn to the metaphysical, the occult and alternative realities will be most comfortable here. But even these may find Hill's third novel too long and talky.

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