The Sacred Disc — Charles West

Winner of the first annual Salvo Press Mystery Novel Award, The Sacred Disc is a story of an accidental private investigator who inherits a detective agency in California's San Joaquin Valley. For his first major case, Bob Fisher is hired by the leaders of the Eternal Truth Temple, a religious cult nestled into the Sierras near Yosemite National Park, to find a missing computer disc containing the cult's sacred text. The prime suspects are former cult members who have formed a committee to expose the cult as a fraud. After asking only a few questions, the murders begin. Fisher must not only overcome his own shady past, but confront zealots who will stop at nothing to keep outsiders away from their real cause. Charles West's fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Isaac Asimov Science Fiction Magazine and Hardboiled. He has been an English teacher in Fresno, California for more than 20 years. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in Shakespeare, a Council for Basic Education Award recipient in Chicano literature, and a fellow at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute at Georgetown University and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. He currently lives in the Sierra foothills with his wife and two daughters. The Sacred Disc is his first novel.