by Boston Teran

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.