God is a Bullet - Softcover

Teran, Boston

3.86

817 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330369415 ISBN 13: 9780330369411

Publisher: Pan Books, 2001

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During Christmas week in 1995, a fourteen-year-old girl is kidnapped by a bloodthirsty satanic cult. Bob Hightower, the girl's father and a small-town cop, embarks on a desperate mission to find her but his only hope lies with Case Hardin, an ex-cult member and ex-junkie living in a halfway house in Hollywood. Their quest - his for his child, hers to exorcise her demons - becomes a primal hunt-and-chase through a savage sub-culture of drugs and ritualistic violence. But it is Bob who holds the final card to throw into the macabre 'game', the twentieth enigma of the tarot, the angel who signals Judgement . .

'An absolutely stupendous debut novel' Mark Timlin, Independent

'It's a roller-coaster of an experience, noir as a purging metaphysical experience that will take your breath away' Guardian

Frightening, ferocious first novel about satanic cults fuelled by drugs and armed to the teeth in the awesome deserts of the American Southwest' Daily Telegraph

'Beautifully written, occasionally creepy and always compelling, it's a striking debut' Dublin Evening Herald

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Review:

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

Review:

"A shotgun thriller with the cocksure timing of a professional hit."
-The New York Times Book Review
"[A] BRILLIANTLY PACED, SUSPENSE-PACKED . . . RICHLY IMAGINED THRILLER . . . It's hard not to admire God Is a Bullet. . . . It's even harder to put the book down."
-The Washington Post Book World

"SMART AND STYLISH . . . A COMPULSIVE READ . . . Within this taut, obsessive narrative, Teran also delivers finely honed character[s]."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"ASTOUNDING . . . AN EXTRAORDINARY DEBUT THRILLER- SWIFT, RAW, AND GENUINELY SCARY."
-The Baltimore Sun

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