Las Vegan Moore earns book award

Local author S.D. Moore’s book “Wicked Prayers” has won the gold medal in the fiction-horror category in the Readers’ Favorite 2017 International Book Award Contest.

In “Wicked Prayers,” two small-town detectives and an unusual band of heroes fight to thwart Evil and his violent creatures.

“As a child, I watched a very Christian woman try to contact her dead sister by placing a letter to her on top of a glass of water sitting on her nightstand before she said her bedtime prayers,” Moore explains. “Spiritualists call this practice water gazing. I used ‘Wicked Prayers’ to explore the question, ‘What if evil came through that spirit door instead?’ ”

The contest drew thousands of entrants from around the world, ranging from new independent authors to New York Times best-sellers.