Sorcerer by James Byron Huggins
All Michael Thorn, retired LA detective and former Special Forces operative, wants to do is live a quiet life in Cedar Ridge, a small New England village. He and his wife Rebecca have bought Montabular Hill, an old Victorian mansion situated on an isolated hillside. He looks forward to raising his two children, eleven year old Anthony and his eight year old sister, Malorie.
But as his SUV tops the last ridge after the nine day drive from Los Angeles, his warrior instincts begin to awaken, triggered by a storm that seems to appear out of nowhere and center over his new home.
But the basement is where he begins to realize there is much more to this house-a place where previous owners have died instead of moving out. Thorn isn’t a superstitious man, but now he feels a fear he’d never had in combat. One that drives him to explore the deeper than usual basement of the old mansion.
A puff of air exhaled by an old wall halts his exploration. Indentations left by bullets mar the upper stones. After his family is asleep, Thorn tears down the wall.
And discovers a corpse so old most of the skin is gone. Bones are shattered by bullets fired long ago. Unusual pictographs scratched on the wall rattle this seasoned war veteran when he realizes only the corpse could have made them, which means the man chained to the wall in his basement had been buried alive.
Thorn leaves the body to call the sheriff. When he returns with the local law enforcement, the body is gone and the only clue is a line of skeletal footprints.
An ancient power is free again and needs to feed upon the living to regain its former power. As death and chaos descend upon the quiet New England hamlet, Thorn, a Catholic priest, an old professor and a mysterious group known as the Assassini battle to defeat the evil that once fought Moses. Defeated once, the ancient sorcerer known as Jannes will do all in his considerable power to emerge the victor this time.
Slowed down a bit at times by explanations of Special Forces procedures/training, Sorcerer is still a fast-paced, supernatural thriller that leaves the reader in suspense until the very end. This is the first book I’ve read written by this author, but it certainly isn’t the last. Highly recommended.
