The Mills of the Gods

Paris, 1925Harry Nolan is an expatriate American, making a meager living as an illustrator for a low-paying magazine, but his life is upended when he is assigned to illustrate an anonymous article about the death of a god – because a centuries-old French brotherhood, the sauteurs, are determined to suppress the story the article tells. The sauteurs have burned the magazine’s office and killed the editor, and Nolan has the only surviving copy of the article. The author turns out to be a local writer named Ernest Hemingway, who – at first – tries to distance himself from the article and its lethal consequences.Vivi Chastain is a rootless 19-year-old orphan who sustains herself by betting on horse races – aided by the spirit of the man she was in a previous life. But now that old identity is crowding her consciousness, threatening to push her own precarious identity into oblivion. It was her alcoholic occasional “stepfather” who told Hemingway the story about killing a god, and the sauteurs are now aware of the story – and of her.The Sauteurs maintain their identities past death through controlled reincarnation – when members die and are reborn, the brotherhood finds their newborn incarnations, kidnaps them, and raises them in special nurseries, where they can fully resume their previous lives. Vivi escaped from one of these nurseries when she was six years old, and so her previous identity has not yet consummated his possession of her. The sauteurs want that consummation to happen – soon.Gertrude Stein is the hub of literary and artistic Paris, and knows many of the city’s supernatural secrets. She has written a book that appears to be nonsense but which can be used to deflect the kind of psychic assault that threatens Vivi, and she becomes a Merlin-like mentor to Vivi and Nolan – who find themselves reluctantly thrown together as hunted fugitives. Their struggles to evade the murderous sauteurs and free Vivi from her increasingly intrusive previous self lead the pair to a mysterious hermit who lives in the towers of Notre Dame cathedral, and the haunted catacombs under Paris, and a confrontation with the Roman goddess Cybele in an other-worldly temple on an island in the Seine. In pursuit of a secret painting by Pablo Picasso, they learn that the god whose death the Hemingway manuscript describes is Moloch, the child-devouring Phoenician god mentioned in the Bible – and that the sauteurs make sacrifices to Moloch to maintain their reincarnations.From the narrow streets and rooftops of post-war Paris to, finally, a supernatural battle between gods in a remote village in Spain, Nolan and Vivi contend with forces natural and supernatural, enemies living and dead, and ultimately find themselves pitted against the god Moloch himself – at peril of their eternal souls.