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
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...
The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.
The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
Bulky, balky, talky.
In an updated quest for the Holy Grail, the narrative pace remains stuck in slo-mo.
But is the Grail, in fact, holy? Turns out that’s a matter of perspective. If you’re a member of that most secret of clandestine societies, the Priory of Sion, you think yes. But if your heart belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, the Grail is more than just unholy, it’s downright subversive and terrifying. At least, so the story goes in this latest of Brown’s exhaustively researched, underimagined treatise-thrillers (Deception Point, 2001, etc.). When Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon—in Paris to deliver a lecture—has his sleep interrupted at two a.m., it’s to discover that the police suspect he’s a murderer, the victim none other than Jacques Saumière, esteemed curator of the Louvre. The evidence against Langdon could hardly be sketchier, but the cops feel huge pressure to make an arrest. And besides, they don’t particularly like Americans. Aided by the murdered man’s granddaughter, Langdon flees the flics to trudge the Grail-path along with pretty, persuasive Sophie, who’s driven by her own need to find answers. The game now afoot amounts to a scavenger hunt for the scholarly, clues supplied by the late curator, whose intent was to enlighten Sophie and bedevil her enemies. It’s not all that easy to identify these enemies. Are they emissaries from the Vatican, bent on foiling the Grail-seekers? From Opus Dei, the wayward, deeply conservative Catholic offshoot bent on foiling everybody? Or any one of a number of freelancers bent on a multifaceted array of private agendas? For that matter, what exactly is the Priory of Sion? What does it have to do with Leonardo? With Mary Magdalene? With (gulp) Walt Disney? By the time Sophie and Langdon reach home base, everything—well, at least more than enough—has been revealed.
Bulky, balky, talky.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50420-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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