Nowhere-Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

In a big step forward for the Raszer franchise, this blockbuster careens along like a freight train, bringing in the tastes of religious history, philosophy, mysticism and present-day Los Angeles that fans of Hill have come to expect... this time adding in a strong element of the digital in the form of an online immersion game that goes out-of-the-box and becomes very, very real. I couldn't put this book down-- Recommended!

A thrilling and engaging 3rd Raszer adventure: at once more accessible for the uninitiated reader, yet more challenging as a cultural leap in the world of online gaming and the Middle East's murky role in the cult persuasion of innocents. The reluctant, angst-filled, albeit canny and worldliwise hero Raszer makes Dan Brown's Langdon look lilly-livered and predictable. Indispensible, dry witted Monica is a sassy, clear-headed foil for the single dad and perrenial seeker. Be prepared for stunning revelations about where alternate, as well as all-too-present realities may lead.

I really enjoyed this book- Hill has a gift. It's a private-eye thriller- made contemporary in content, with spirituality as the criminal content and motivation. Hill has a great dramatic sense, and is able to keep the reader craving for more.

I agree with Judith Freeman --- herself author of a terrific book on Raymond Chandler, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Women He Loved --- who, in the L.A. Weekly, recently wrote that Nowhere-Land "may be the first truly 21st-century mystery I've read." "It feels new," Freeman continues, "radical in the way that the movie Blade Runner felt new. Just as Blade Runner offered a vision of a future in which technology had blurred the most basic questions (i.e., Is that chick human or not?), so too does Nowhere-Land stumble our brains, as the Jehovah's Witnesses who drift in and out of this story might say, by suggesting other dystopian scenarios taking place not in a distant future but rather present time. "Hill has written an astute thriller, focused on religions and cults and the way they've been used to master civilizations. But Nowhere-Land is also about what might be called the very new cults of Internet game playing, and how role-playing games move from the Web to the real world, from "make-believe" to more chaotic fictions that can spawn terror when dark minds gain control. "This is the third book Hill has written featuring Raszer, a P.I. who specializes in using his psychic skills to rescue victims of cults. In Nowhere-Land, Scotty Darrell, a devotee of an RPG called The Gauntlet, has gone missing -- he's been given "extreme unction" or died to the world and is beyond recall -- and it's Raszer's job to find him. At the same time, a young member of the Jehovah's Witnesses, Katy Endicott, is abducted and her friends murdered, and the elders of the sect hire Raszer to find her. Both stories converge around scenarios laid out by The Gauntlet's games masters and two former American soldiers who served in Iraq. "Though the story starts in that quintessential L.A. burb, Asuza, where the abduction takes place, it moves quickly to Taos, and then the Middle East, the 'nowhere' land where Turkey and Syria bleed into Iran and Iraq (bleed being the right word). And it's here, in the remotest regions of the Really Old World, that Nowhere-Land begins to feel less the conventional mystery than the trippy product of opium dream. "If the book at times reads like an amalgam of influences -- Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Huxley's The Doors of Perception, Huck Finn on dope, Harrison Ford on a quest to rescue the girl, Dexter Filkins embedded with Special Forces, Philip Marlowe cracking wise, Harold Bloom on World Religion, well, who cares? It's all so skillfully woven, and one learns amazing things -- for instance, that the Jehovah's Witnesses (and presumably others who thirst for the End Time) believe that only 144,000 souls will be beamed up during The Rapture. (Who knew there'd be so few?) "But then Hill is as convincing writing about Cybelian castration cults and the black stone of the Ka'ba as he is in describing Kurdish towns and a war-blasted landscape. You buy the notion of conspiracy fueling even

A.W. Hill's P.I., Stephan Raszer, is part skeptic, part Hollywood Hills mystic, a dreamer pulling dreamers back from beyond the edge, as evolved as a tough guy can be and vice versa--as elegant and complete a male protagonist as is probably possible in the 21st Century. In Nowhere-Land, Hill manages to stake the plot of the beyond on top of the plot of the story, making for a page-turner that tries not to be too much more but can't quite help it. Guilty and spiritual pleasure dancing on the head of a pin. And aside from the humor in Carl Hiassen and Elmore Leonard, I haven't loved detective fiction since Raymond Chandler.