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. (June)
