The Oracle's Daughter

'Hill is an extremely skilled writer, and his conscientious, measured reporting is a gift.' New York Times'Troubling, uplifting, heartbreaking... a masterwork.' Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life, AnimatedOn a cool autumn night in 1999, twenty-six-year-old Sarah Green crept out of her house and ran for her life. She was escaping not just the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary religious cult operating out of the New Mexico desert, but also the cruelty of the cult's leader-her mother, Deborah. In The Oracle's Daughter, Harrison Hill traces the fascinating beginnings and violent end of ACMTC, from its early days as an outgrowth of the hippie movement, through the conspiracy-theorist 1990s and into the present day. It follows Deborah, the group's founder and self-proclaimed oracle; Maura, one of its first members; and Sarah, Deborah's daughter, among the cult's primary victims. With a propulsive, deeply researched narrative, The Oracle's Daughter illuminates the strange world of religious cults-and how more vulnerable we are to extremism than we might like to think.

Pages: 352, Hardcover, The Bridge Street Press