Description
Heaven and Hell On Earth, an intellectually gritty tome in the vein of Dan Brown and Donald Goines, is a powerful genre-blending thriller of approximately 260,000 words that mixes street, romance and detective fiction with history, urban theology and sociopolitics.
A pair coming of age characters, Gabriel and Lucifer are twin phenoms separated at birth and raised in totally different circumstances. The world is their playground.
Gabriel Goodwyn is brought up a saintly child of sorts, having been not just abandoned on the doorstep of a historic Philadelphia church but found and begotten an only son by prominent northeastern couple with direct lineage to Old Society Europe. Brilliant to the gist of living manifested prophecy, Gabe's mission is one to do with poverty and potential, from Detroit to Dublin to Dakar. But he's an unlikely savior, plenty young and human, challenging the ancient conspiracies of his own affiliation as well as unsolved mysteries of the day, threatened by personal scandal and actual assassination.
Lucifer, the spiteful survivor of a house fire that sparked the redhead's legend in the first place, is the cold clever lieutenant of a notorious underworld hood posse. In a ghetto sphere stretching from Miami to New Orleans and brimming with some of the most colorful characters as well as those not uncommon in urban lit---Jamaican cokelords, blockhuggers, immigrant terribles, etc.---the diabolic street chieftain otherwise known as Lucy is relentlessly pursued by a pair of hardboiled Birmingham detectives, one a seasoned yet washed-up drinker with demons of his own, the other a streetwise young local made good, both with motives for this one no less personal than they are emotional.
