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 most recent and best novel, Little Gods, deals with murder and vengeance at en elite New England prep school, and was released in November, 2006. Since then it has garnered resounding praise and has been nominated for several awards.

The author has two grown daughters, a genetic counselor and an artist/​photographer, and lives with his wife in Washington, DC. He is at work on his next novel and can be reached at davidlhoof@​littlegods.net.