Christian-pleasing epic of conspiracy and war.
Madison offers an alternate history of the Vietnam War in this debut Christian thriller.
Drawing heavily from conspiracies related to the New World Order, Madison serves up a novel of war and intrigue on an epic scale. After learning that the string of the American government are being pulled by Medusa—a shadowy organization best described as “a diaphanous horror-hybrid of technology, economics, psychology, politics, and religion”—the reader is introduced to David Rixon, a West Texas orphan raised by the Christian and kind Gonzales family. Rixon grows up to serve the U.S. military in Vietnam, where he commands the counterintelligence “Omega” outpost. Working to protect the people of South Vietnam from the ravages of the Communist north, Rixon discovers a more insidious enemy at work in the war, this one based inside his own government. With the help of his stateside father, Jose Gonzales, Rixon uncovers a conspiracy centuries in the making, one involved in such earth-shattering events as the rise of Hitler and the Kennedy assassination. As if a powerful shadow order weren’t enough to contend with on its own, evidence leads Rixon to suspect that hidden behind the enemy is an even worse evil. The worst evil, in fact: the sworn enemy of the God in whom Rixon was raised to believe. Madison is a highly effective storyteller, masterfully tempting readers forward from one revelation to the next. Even so, the dogmatic plot and its politics often prevent total immersion. Like much conspiracy literature, the book has a decidedly libertarian bent, highly suspicious of elites, banks, and governments. The novel’s defining quality, however, is its overt and fundamental Christianity. It is this religiosity that contributes to the novel’s ultimate tedium, reliant, as it is, on that religion’s well-trodden eschatology. The end is predictably apocalyptic: higher powers intervene, cosmic battles are waged, and a small group of believers finds deliverance through the power of prayer. Devout readers may find the premise exciting, but the more secular will likely find this novel to be preachy and overly reliant on (literal) deus ex machina. Two more works in a planned trilogy will follow.
Christian-pleasing epic of conspiracy and war.Pub Date: July 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4935-2839-4
Page Count: 596
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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