The Order

by Alan Thompson

Boomer Joy and Angst Over Seven Decades! Amidst unprecedented chaos on campus – vandalism, rape, even murder – the Chancellor aims to destroy the Order, a mysterious secret society founded at the College 200 years earlier. The Castle, a replica of a Norman fortress where the group conducts its rituals, is slated for demolition, and Harry Monmouth, a one-time member, is enlisted to defend the “knights” and their secrets. His efforts lead him into the past, to the beginning of the Order and events that cast light on the present-day turmoil.
The New Hope Canon is a series of novels depicting the lives of the Baby Boom generation in a small college town in the South. New Hope, a stand-in for the author’s hometown of Chapel Hill, NC, provides the stage where its Boomer characters confront momentous issues, some imposed by the past, others of their own making. Murder and mayhem, products of the ferment, wind among them.
The first book, A Hollow Cup, explores the racial turmoil of the 60s as seen through the eyes of teenagers – black and white – while at the same time recalling the everyday, bittersweet realities of growing up in that era. In Gods and Lesser Men, a young couple, carefree and falling in love, struggle with the Sexual Revolution, unplanned pregnancy and the newly-minted option of abortion just as a relic of the enlightened past, eugenics, threatens to destroy them. Lucifer’s Promise describes the quest for immortality, and The Order delves into the one unshakable truth of the generations of Man: Each one is undeniably the product of those that go before.

331 pages, Paperback

Published August 15, 2017

About the author

Born in Danville, Kentucky, on January 31, 1949, Mr. Thompson grew up in his beloved Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A 1966 graduate of Chapel Hill High School, he received his B.A. from the University of Kentucky in 1970, and his J.D. from the same institution in 1973. He has practiced law for the past forty years, primarily in Atlanta, Georgia, and now resides in Georgetown, South Carolina. His civil trial work extended to dozens of jurisdictions throughout the United States, Australia and England, and he contributed to several professional journals and treatises dealing with his particular area of expertise, construction law.
He began writing seriously in 2008, and his first novel, A Hollow Cup, was published in 2011. He and his wife Barbie have two sons, one a lawyer in Salt Lake City, the other a Navy helicopter pilot currently stationed in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Mr. Thompson plays an occasional round of bad golf, and he and his bride can sometimes be found having a late-afternoon cocktail or glass of wine at the beach.