American Craftsmen

Doyle, a graduate of the Clarion Writing Workshop and author of critically acclaimed short stories, breaks into the popular mainstream with this first novel, a multigenre blend incorporating elements of supernatural fantasy, military fiction, spy thriller, and alternate history. The titular "craftsmen" are not carpenters or watchmakers but elite military practitioners of a more secretive and dangerous craft: sorcery. The world they inhabit is similar to our own, complete with brushfire wars in the Middle East, a bureaucratic Washington, DC, and a U.S. heartland full of small-town motels well stocked with Gideon Bibles. But in Doyle's version, military operations sometimes involve the use of mind blasting and matter-manipulating magic spells, as well as grenades and guns, bureaucracies that can hold secrets of truly devilish darkness, and the Bibles, like many other things, are not quite what they seem.