RADIANT NIGHT

Patrick Lohier's enticing debut novel weaves history, conspiracy, and adrenaline to produce a wildly entertaining and fast-paced literary thriller.

Ludwig Mason is the only Marine to survive the explosion that reduced his military Humvee to a scattered mess of smoking metal parts in war-torn Fallujah. In the traumatized, drug-addled aftermath, the 28-year-old Iraq war vet, now back on American soil, fears that he's lost his family, his friends, and his last chance at anything when something like fate intervenes in the form of a mysterious woman named Mrs. S.

The old fortuneteller tells Ludwig of an heirloom that had been seized from her family by Nazis a fabled tarot deck that has 23 major arcana cards instead of the customary 22. A deck that she believes is now located somewhere in New Orleans.

Whatever it was that brought Ludwig to Mrs. S be it chance, fate, or something greater would now draw him into a hallucinatory odyssey fraught with symbols, coincidences and paranoia in order to retrieve the missing tarot deck and, with any luck, a piece of his own lost soul.

Patrick Lohier was born in Montreal, Canada. He grew up in Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Chicago. His stories, book reviews, and essays have appeared in Callaloo, African American Review, The Common Review, The Georgia Review and The Globe & Mail among other publications. He has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, and he is an alumnus of the Caldera Artists Residency program, in Sisters, Oregon. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two children.