David L. Hoof

Born December 2, 1945 in Washington, DC, David L. Hoof traveled with a Navy family. He lived in Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Hawaii and London, England before entering Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts as a sophomore. Earning All American honors in swimming for three straight years, he captained the team his senior year. From Deerfield he went on to Cornell University as a Meinig National Scholar, was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and majored in chemistry. From Cornell he went on to graduate school in chemistry at Purdue, earning his Ph.D. After Purdue he took a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Georgetown University. Subsequent to this he taught briefly at Montgomery College before entering the United States Department of Energy, where he dealt with the reprocessing of nuclear reactor fuel.

Throughout his schooling he became more seriously interested in writing. At Cornell he was captioner for photographs in the Red Key calendar and edited his fraternity’s rush book. The first published work under his own name was a poem in a Purdue literary magazine. Between then and the appearance of his first published novel, Sight Unseen (as David Lorne) in 1990, he contributed articles to several nationally distributed magazines, on subjects as diverse as AIDS and William Shakespeare’s business practices. In 1990 he left the Department of Energy to spend more time with his children and write full time. Blind Man’s Bluff, a sequel to his first novel, appeared in 1992 following another novel, The Last Prisoner (1991), a cult classic among science fiction readers that dealt with social disintegration following clandestine biological warfare.

Sight Unseen and Blind Man’s Bluff, along with a third novel, Blind Rage, published only in Japanese, were runaway best sellers in that country. These novels, featuring the blind detective Spike Halleck, have also been translated into Dutch, Danish and Bulgarian, as well as optioned for films.

In addition to writing, he taught all aspects of creating writing (plot, character, setting, character, and dialogue) at Georgetown University and for the Writers Digest School. In 1996 his screenplay, Shooting Script, won bronze at Worldfest Charleston.

Writing as Grace Alter, 2005’s The Suicide Diary is a rollickingly absurd and ultimately hilarious dark satire set in Arctic Canada. Despite its chilling setting, the story is simmering with conflicts between father, daughter, nudist weapon dealer, Islamic terrorists, FBI agents, FedEx drivers, absentee mothers, mail-order Russian brides, Siberian Shamans, UFO seekers and polar bears.

His novel Little Gods, deals with murder and vengeance at en elite New England prep school has garnered resounding praise and won honorable mention in the Beach Book Festival of 2010. Triple Jeopady is a rollocking, no-holds-barred satire on marriage, money and divorce that comes off as a hilarious merger of Wall Street with The War of the Roses.

The most recent novel from Hoof is a modern Western thriller that picks up where Tony Hillerman left off. Set in the dying rural town of Sanctuary, Montana, Sharpshooter pits its hero, half-Crow Redfawn Kravitz, against a serial killer who strikes from distance with a Sharps buffalo rifle, then seems to melt in and out of the past. It is written in lyrical, evocative language as haunting and beautiful as any in print.

The author has two grown daughters, a genetic counselor and a teacher/​ artist/​photographer, and lives with his wife in Washington, DC.

Website:  https://www.littlegods.net/index.htm

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Praise for David L. Hoof

“An exciting, frightening and disturbing horror, science fiction thriller, “Landfill” is an absorbing ride into the dark and creepy depths of ecological terror.  I highly recommend “Landfill” to any fan of the horror/Science fiction/thriller genre. A gripping and thrilling read.”  –Book Girl (Amazon)

For Little Gods:

“This is a powerful story about a young man coming of age in a time of both personal and national reckoning. For those of us who lived through that difficult period when fathers, sons and brothers were off at war while a struggle continued at home, Little Gods is a poignant reminder how the reverberations of a conflict affect us all.”  – Senator John Kerry

For Sharpshooter:

“David Hoof re-establishes himself as one of the most talented and versatile masters of the writer’s craft with a Western thriller featuring Red Kravitz, a new hero whose originality and persistence render his narrative gripping from the first page.”
– Don Gastwirth, former editor, Yale Literary Magazine

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