Sacred Books & Sky Hooks

Sacred Books & Sky Hooks is a genre-bending literary thriller with occasional dollops of humor. Like Melville's Moby Dick,  it is punctuated by nonfictional discussions of a central subject. Instead of whales and whaling, this novel deals with the subject of founder myths: sacred stories told by and about founders of religious movements. And instead of being a tale of a quest on the high seas, it is a literary thriller featuring kidnapping, murder, and escape.

A former Washington lawyer and amateur comparative religionist puts three such myths—those created by Corky Ra, founder of a contemporary start-up religion; Joseph Smith; and the Apostle Paul—on a virtual stand and finds them all guilty of making questionable claims about their divine revelations. On publishing his findings, he becomes anathema to the religiously correct, engages his nemesis in a Western-style shootout, and finally finds solace in a faraway place.