The Flight of the Mayday Squadron

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.