"A courageous unprecedented true story of his fight for justice against powerful unholy alliances."
Journalist Cheri Seymour author of Committee of States: Inside the Radical Right" and "The Last Circle"
"So please strap in and prepare for a sojourn to "hell" with Mark."
Kris Milligan Publisher Trineday
"As stories go, it's a tragedy, a triumph, and mystery"
Dr. Richard B. Spence, American Historian and expert on military, espionage, and occult history
After reading Houses of the Holy, you will wish someone had warned author Mark Harris not to trust the people you meet online—especially when it comes to their honesty about who they are and what they want. Yet, as a new century dawned, no alarms went off when he finally met the online pen-pal he believed was the love of his life.
All he wanted was to marry and raise two sons from the young woman’s other relationships. Instead, his journey into marriage and fatherhood plunged him into a nightmarish world of child abuse and trafficking, evangelical cults, far-right organizations, and powerful criminal networks—one that would last for 17 years.
In painstaking detail, Harris recounts his descent from a quiet life in a rural religious community near Niceville, Florida, to a massive federal cover-up that cost him everything: his home, his livelihood, and his reputation. He was willing to endure the consequences of exposing an extensive child abuse and trafficking ring involving church officials, right-wing cults, and the torture of missing foster children. But what he uncovered was far darker than anyone could have imagined.
Houses of the Holy is the true story of survival as Harris fights to protect his sons from a federal convict and apparent government informant—while also uncovering a sprawling criminal network that threatened not only his family, but many others. This web of corruption led to a murder and lynching witnessed by his children, as Harris’ attempts to bring justice to those responsible were met with vicious retaliation from those in power, all the way to the highest levels of the federal government.
Caught in a tangled conspiracy of wealthy, politically-connected developers, donors, church leaders, politicians, white supremacists, neo-Confederates, government informants, mobsters, assassins, spies, drug dealers, and international weapons traffickers, Harris and his children found themselves targeted by a secret underground network tied to the military—one full of weapons, explosives, drug labs, and torture devices, all led by the notorious felon and federal informant who claimed to own the gun that killed JFK. This felon ended up being the father of the woman he believed he had fallen in love with. Despite the incredible odds and relentless efforts to silence his story, Harris fought to save his children—and to expose the sinister forces conspiring against them. In chilling detail, Houses of the Holy tells his harrowing journey from naïve belief in the American Dream to the bitter reality of corruption at every level of government, with the complicity of religious institutions. This is the story of one man’s battle against a cast of characters both grotesque and terrifying—people willing to commit and cover up unimaginable crimes through an unholy alliance of church, state, and money.
