Beyond the Hallowed Halls

RELEASE DATE TBA

BEYOND THE HALLOWED HALLS is a coming of age novel chronicling the harrowing high school urban escapades of Archimedes T’Leal Diggs. Set in Detroit’s inner city during the socially turbulent years of 1963 to 1967, with the backdrop of an escalating war and race riots exploding across the nation, a backyard reenactment of the Eichmann execution gone awry induces the agnostic twelve-year old to pledge his life to God. Searching for a loophole, it strikes the streetwise con artist that a Jesuit education just might provide the escape from the ghetto violence of the Lower East Side. Had he realized the daily torture tests involved, he certainly would have decided to hang.

Experiencing the seedy underside of seminary life from pedophile priests, assaults, arson and mass murder, to elaborate practical jokes involving an electrocution and insurance fraud, Diggs’ life is further complicated when a simple visit to a barber shop turns him into the defacto bookkeeper for the mob.

The story exhibits all the raw energy of Lee Childs’ character, Jack Reacher as an adolescent, coupled with the excitement and intrigue of Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code, in exposing and debunking Detroit’s only Catholic shrine.