Burning Altars

by Bill Rapp

Book by Rapp, Bill

218 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2011

About the author

I may have spent the last thirty-five years as a diplomat/analyst working for the federal government, but I began my adult life as a professional historian. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame with a B.A. in History and German, I received my M.A. in European History from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. I taught history at Iowa State University for one year but then decided to shift my efforts to something less settled and moved to Washington, D.C. That career has taken me to Berlin, Ottawa, Baghdad, and now London, with long stays in Washington in between.

Through it all I never lost my love of history and literature, especially crime fiction, which I often read to take a break from all the history books I had to study for my course work, thesis, and dissertation. Fortunately, I was able to apply that affinity for our past throughout my career with the government, while it also inspired much of my writing. You can see that, for example, in the Berlin novels, especially Tears of Innocence, as I spent several years there as a student and later as a diplomat during the fall of the Wall and Germany's reunification. Even the Naperville private detective series (Angel in Black, A Pale Rain, and Burning Altars) draws on the local history and development of the Chicago area, just as Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald--the two paragons of American detective fiction, in my eyes--did in their novels and stories set in southern California.

Reviews

[Walter Curran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Modern day version of the Hatfields and McCoys. Family squabbles to the Nth degree. Covering a span of ninety years, the suspense and mystery builds , twists and turns, keeping you enthralled the entire time.

[Joshua Evan Thacker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book from start to finish