The opening pages of The Killing Spirit read and sound like an amalgam of Dashiell Hammett and Bob Dylan.  The clipped sentences flow like measures of music singing off the page.  The reader feels thrown into a cold rushing stream of a man's life and heritage. 

Dark times will produce a dark narrative and its singer Jack Random is perfectly suited for those times.  In the character of Jerico Whitehorse he has distilled the ages to bring the process full circle.  Even as Jerico is the dreamer of profound insight, Random is the teller of the tale [and] the reader of the auguries now so abundant in the air around us. 

The question before us is how to live with this knowledge:  Does the key lie at the terminus of the great river and the mysteries of New Orleans?  Only Jack Random can tell us and he will in a voice that carries the gift of all great writers.  It awakens us to the full presence of what it means to be human.