Blood Solstice

Grover Graft, 29, investigative reporter for the Times-Herald of Albany, N.Y. is the chatty narrator-hero of this thriller--which centers on a fiendish religious cult. Grover, despite resistance from his stodgy bosses at the "rag," keeps digging into the doings of a local cult called the Children of Abraham--especially when a suburban couple begs him to search for their daughter, who disappeared after joining the cult's California branch. Undeterred by harassment by the cult, Grover is soon heading out to San Francisco--where his sleuthing almost immediately seems to lead to the throat-cutting of an ex-cultist informer. Back east, the trail leads to a cult farm in Vermont--where Grover catches a glimpse of his old flame Lisa Hurlbett, twin sister of his old pal Jim, who was recently found mutilated, pieces of the carefully dismembered body turning up at landfills across Vermont. After quitting his newspaper job , Grover goes it alone against the cult--unmasking its shadowy guru, battling several crazies, surviving various ordeals and chases. . .and exposing a lurid scheme involving lobotomy, incest, drugs, homosexuality, and blackmail.