God Is a Bullet - Hardcover

God Is A Bullet , hardcover, Very Good, 1st Edition pp 306 Rough cut pages else pristine

Opening with the brutal murder of a woman in 1970 Boston, Teran's God Is A Bullet then jumps forward 25 years to another savage killing. Local cop Bob Hightower discovers his ex-wife and her new husband ritually massacred and his daughter abducted. Setting out to find her, Hightower's only clue is a card pinned to the dead man's chest--"the Judgement...the twentieth enigma of the Tarot"--and his only help an ex-junkie and ex-cult member, Case Hardin, who recognises the trademarks of the sinister Left-Handed Path and its leader Cyrus. Knowing from personal experience the likely fate of Hightower's daughter, she joins Hightower in a desperate search for the missing girl, and the slow uncovering of the connection between the two murders reveals a web of deceit and corruption that extends deep into the heart of small-town America.

Teran's book manages to combine a sure sense of the dynamics of the thriller genre with a convincing examination of the darker legacies of the sixties. Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders are obvious reference points for the Left-Handed Path and its conjunction of satanic obsession, drugs, and philosophies of amorality, and Cyrus is a frightening articulation of the dark, negative energies of that decade's fallout:

It was there, in that trailer...that [Cyrus] found the true architect of the modern world...Where he found the only son of man--and he wasn't some jerk-off named Jesus. He was the architect who allowed for the zero-sum game with all its depravities. Who found beauty in blood, a christening through ultimate chaos. Who understood it was better to reign in some perilous extreme than to serve a life sentence of propriety out of fear.

A vertigo-inducing descent into the diseased underbelly of American culture, Boston Teran's first novel is a powerful, accomplished thriller. The author's evocation of a subculture of evil and depravity is disturbingly plausible in its exploration of cult activity, and of the mindsets of those for whom ethics and conventional morality are just a sham--and normal people just "sheep" to be slaughtered. --Burhan Tufail