Unveiled

The lake was quiet. A lazy fog hovered over the surface of the gray water … The world seemed dead to Arson Gable, silent anyway. Like the calm before the storm. It waited … He cut his gaze toward the lake, that black womb which rested beyond and beneath the rickety docks. It was as if the lake knew his name and his heartbeats … Whether he wanted to admit it or not, this place was home, and there was no going back.

Thus begins the strangely jarring, often disjointed, and consistently mesmerizing tale of a young man who would love to think himself a super hero but seems consigned to merely being a freak. Arson is drawn to the lake behind his house for a reason; a fire literally burns in his bones that he fears will once again consume something or someone he loves. Raised by his mildly crazed grandmother, Arson has been reminded for years that he was most certainly the cause of his mother’s death during childbirth. In some ways he is no different than any other teenage boy: sick in love with a girl who could care less about him and desperately trying to make sense of the rules of social interaction in school. In some ways he is no different. Only in some ways.

Arson’s life becomes further complicated by the arrival of new neighbors with their own secrets. Most notable is a daughter by the name of Emery. Everyone in this story has something to hide: Arson and his proclivity to start fires, Emery’s father and his drunken escape from the ministry, and an old woman with a secret so deep she has yet to admit it even exists. But Emery serves as a picture of all of them. She too hides behind a mask – a real mask that covers the scars of some unnamed accident in her past. Together, she and Arson will ultimately be forced to face both the hurts they hide from and the hopes they fear believing in.

If Arson has any negative it is found in the abrupt way it ends. Though I am sure this is due to a set-up for a sequel it still leaves one backing up a few pages and wondering what was missed. That slight criticism quickly evaporates when one stops to remember this is a novel written by someone barely old enough to vote and already past his third novel. Though definitely leaning toward a Young Adult style, Estevan Vega writes with a clarity and focus beyond his years. Mike Dellosso is right in the book’s recommendations when he likens Vega’s characters to those in Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas. Quirky? Yes. Unbelievable? Absolutely not!

This is a story of self-loathing and self-discovery. It asks some big questions about the nature of man and God in a powerful and yet unobtrusive way. Along the way it offers a snap-shot of teenage angst and yet something more. Something that entails all of us. What masks do we hide behind? What secrets do we fear? What hopes do we hesitate to embrace? I can’t say I understand everything about the way Arson reads or ends but of this I am sure of – it won’t be the last novel by Estevan Vega to grace my book shelf. Until then, I think I’ll pick Arson back up some time soon. There’s something about it that draws me – like a moth to the flame.

Publisher: Tate Publishing (May 2010)

ChristianBook.com has some great prices of faith based suspense. Better check this out quick because they usually go fast!

Admission – Travis Thrasher 1.99	Blinded by Travis Thrasher 1.99
Finder’s Fee by Alton Gansky 1.99	False Witness by Randy Singer 2.99
The Dead Whisper On by T.L.Hines 2.99	Lost Mission by Athol Dickson 4.99

Grand Prize
Carole Robishaw 

1st Prize
Susan J. Reinhardt

2nd Prize
James Andrew Wilson

3rd Prize
Michelle Vosquez

Thanks to all who entered and to Mike Dellosso for helping make this possible. All winners be sure and email your mailing address. If  you didn’t win, go out and buy Darlington Woods – you will be glad you did. Let’s help Mike shine the light!

In The Clouds Roll Away, author Sibella Giorello brings us another installment of the many trials of Special Agent Raleigh Harmon. Some things have changed for Raleigh: she’s back home in Virginia and she is being pursued by an on-again-off-again suitor. But too much is the same: her new boss at the Richmond Bureau office is determined to remind her of Raleigh’s past reprimands and she still gets the worst car in the motor pool. Added to the mix of distractions are a mother on the verge of a mental breakdown and a tenant that becomes entangled in her investigations.

At first, the plot of The Clouds Rolls Away seems to be following Giorello’s first novel, The Stones Cry Out. But hang in there; the turn this story makes is worth the buildup it takes to get there. Another author once asked me what I felt when I read his novel. He said, what his readers feel is more important to him than the details they remember. Giorello’s strength is character development and mood. As to mood, one can’t help but feel the undertones that permeate the complicated culture of the old South. Southern gentility struggles to remain intact in the face of rapid changes and new residents that have no regard for accepted conventions. Good and bad are hard to distinguish beneath the prejudice of old money and the facade of new money. And don’t be fooled by those who are quickly assumed to be victims either. Nothing is at it seems on the banks of the James River.

Though the plot is well paced, character still wins out in The Clouds Roll Away. Raleigh is a person who feels certain in one aspect of her life – her training. Whenever she needs to concentrate, she resorts to thinking of the chemical structure of the dirt she is looking at. Forensic Geology is the one thing that makes complete sense. But maneuvering through the intricacies of government protocol and personal relationships baffle her. Why does she do her job so well but still find herself butting heads with everyone around her? Why does she find it so easy to deal harshly with her tenant when he messes up?

With all this character development you might wonder if there is a villain to be stopped. There is indeed a bad guy to catch – a really disgusting bad guy. In the process of uncovering that evil, Raleigh finally begins to come to grips with what is wrong with her own heart. From the death of her father the judge a few years earlier to her mother’s long regression to former times Raleigh has been living in a convoluted fog of faith and doubt. You’ll have to read to the very end to find out if, at last, The Clouds Roll Away.

Reviewed by Tim George
Genre: Suspense
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Publication Date: March 2010

Review copy provided by Thomas Nelson

Linda Wagner

Grand Prize (autographed library of Athol Dickson’s last five novels).

Lori Kasbeer

Bonus prize – Whom Shall I Fear & Every Hidden Thing

A special thank-you will be sent to the next three people who placed in the contest.

• Neppie Hay
• Shirley McClay
• CathyBaldwin

Thanks to all who took part in this special event and to Athol Dickson for kindly offering to be offer his autograph. Unveiled will be contacting each of you for address information in the next couple of days.

the unrelenting grace of God

Thirteen years ago, Siggy Gamble ran away from home, never to be found – until his body washed ashore on the tiny island of Winter Haven off the coast of Maine. Now his sister, Vera, travels north to claim the body and finds herself tangled in the impossible. Her brother hasn’t aged a day since she last saw him. Determined to uncover the cause of Siggy’s mysterious end, Vera soon learns there are many secrets haunting the island – tales of lost colonies, of a witch bent on revenge, and a towering forest where no creature dares lives. Hemmed in by distrustful locals … will Vera’s desperate questions lead to answers, or will her story become yet one more dark Winter Haven legend? (From the book cover)

Vera Gamble is a numbers person, a mid-level accountant who has managed to lose herself in her ordered world of too- long work hours, TV dinners, and isolation. But one phone call changes everything leading her to make painful discoveries about her long-lost autistic brother and her own tortured past on a little piece of real estate off the coast of Maine called Winter Haven. Nothing is what it seems on this remote island fifty miles out in the Atlantic: not the people, not the sounds of the forest, and not the ageless body of her autistic brother laying in an icehouse.

This is a classic gothic story set on a classic gothic mystery island. Unlike River Rising and The Cure, Winter Haven is less a parable and more a story of self-discovery, conquered fears, and the unrelenting grace of God. One reviewer commented that the ending of Winter Haven is implausible. Perhaps, but then again so are the mysterious workings of God in the lives and affairs of mankind.

Questions for the author, Athol Dickson

This is the second novel you based in Maine. What is it about Maine that makes it so attractive to suspense and mystery?

I tend to choose settings or invent settings much as I create characters. They play a major role in creating the mood of the story. Sometimes they even participate in the events. Winter Haven is a good example of this. I decided to set the story on an island far off the coast of Maine because the events and the characters made more sense in a very isolated location, and Maine feels very remote to me, very much out of the American mainstream. Also, just as you want your characters to be unique and interesting, Maine has a strong culture which is very distinct from the rest of the USA. Mainers have their own foods. They have a distinct accent and a vocabulary nobody else uses. They’re also hard to pin down as a people, for example they’re politically liberal, but they have a Republican governor and senator. I love visiting Maine, and find it fascinating, and it’s always easier to get a sense of charm into a book if you feel it yourself.

You are have stated in other interviews that you generally start with a theme for your stories. What was the working theme of Winter Haven as you framed the story?

Thematically, Winter Haven is about the fact that God wants us to wrestle with Him. “Israel” means “wrestles (or strives) with God.” It’s what he named Jacob, and through Jacob, an entire people whom He later called His “treasured possession” But so many of us are afraid to go to God with out doubts and questions. We worry that He’ll be angry with us, or that it’s a kind of faithlessness to question God. God loves an honest question. Think of Abraham bargaining with God in the hills above Sodom. “Will not the judge of all the earth do right?” Talk about chutzpah! And there’s a moment in the wilderness when the newly freed Israelites are “wailing” about manna—they think it’s boring food; they want meat—and Moses goes to God and complains about the job that he’s been given. Moses is very direct with God about his unhappiness as the leader of Israel. He doesn’t want the job anymore. He asks God to put somebody else in charge, or else kill him and get it over with. It almost seems disrespectful, how Moses talks to God, but God loves it. He loves the honesty so much he honors Moses with a special relationship. In fact, right after Moses does the worst of his complaining, God tells Miriam and Aaron that Moses is the only person on earth that He will speak with to “face to face.” God seems to treasure the fact that here, in Moses, He finally has someone who will deal with Him as if He’s fully and completely there, the way a person deals with any loved one. So I wanted to get that idea across in Winter Haven: the fact that the Creator of the universe would rather that we were hot or even cold, than lukewarm and distant. If we have doubts and questions, we should take them straight to God. Questioning can be an act of faith, if it’s done with the right attitude.

Reviewed by Tim George, Unveiled
Genre: Suspense
Publisher: Bethany House
Publication Date: April 2008

 is the price too high for the cure?

There was a time when Riley Keep was a man of supreme confidence: minister, missionary, educator of New England’s finest. Then something terrible happened; he came face to face with his humanity and what he saw changed him. Now he returns home years later an abject failure, a ghost moving among the living. By accident he catches his reflection in a mirror and he sees something far different: failed protector of an entire people, weakling of a husband, incompetent father, and drunkard.

Athol Dickson offers us the most unlikely, and to be honest, most unlikeable of heroes. Riley Keep has fallen so far that when he returns to his home town in Maine along with a dying homeless friend no one even recognizes him. Not the church people, not his former friends, and not even the mayor who just happens to be his ex-wife. Through an apparent accident Riley discovers something every person trapped by the demons of their personal sins would give anything to have, a magic bullet that would forever take away their addiction. Riley Keep has discovered The Cure.

What happens next is on one level a rousing suspense story and on another a parable of failure and despair. It is the story of far away pagans and the pagan within us all. And in the end it is a story of ultimate hope. As always, Dickson’s characters are vivid, tragic, heroic, well-intentioned, and severely flawed. Even when Riley Keep gets his act together and appears to become a great success he is within himself a failure. In other words he is real. Perhaps this is why some found this story uncomfortable. Upon his return to his home town, Riley observes that people walk by him but never look into eyes, never see him. He guesses it is because they fear they see some of themselves. I think Riley Keep guesses right.

The Cure ends with these words: Riley was no longer dead; his ghostly days were over… here at last was something truly good to drink. The Cure is something truly good to drink.

One question for the author, Athol Dickson …When I asked for questions from fans of Unveiled there was one theme that emerged. Riley Keep’s character had such depth how much of Athol Dickson is hiding inside of Riley?

I do indeed have personal experience with drug addiction and with homelessness. In my late teens, I started drinking and smoking marijuana, and soon I began using narcotics of almost every kind, from LSD to heroin. I was stoned pretty much continuously for about eight years. I ended up addicted to methamphetamine, my drug of choice, what some people call “crank” or simply, “meth.” I was also homeless for a little while, although I always managed to sleep on the floors or sofas of my fellow dopers and never spent the night in a shelter. But I do know what it feels like. So I learned most of what I needed to know to write THE CURE through those experiences, and the rest I’ve learned through association with alcoholic friends and family members, and by volunteering over the years at shelters.

Although it has been years since I considered myself a drug addict, I’ve been to AA meetings and I spend several hours at a shelter near my home a couple of days every month, helping people put together resumes, preparing meals for them, and just hanging out to spread the love. They say an alcoholic is always an alcoholic, but for me at least, the meth addiction has been healed. I do, however, remain addicted to sin, and while that may not sound like the same thing, in fact it really is. Your readers can learn more about this and about the theme of THE CURE in a couple of posts over at my blog, here and here.

Reviewed by Tim George
Genre: Suspense
Publisher: Bethany House
Publication Date: July 2007

family secrets can be deadly

CJ Baxter has managed to forge a life for himself far from his home town of Adelia in Upstate New York and the dysfunctional family he left behind there. Though a successful novelist, CJ doesn’t feel much like a success. His marriage is on the rocks and he has begun to doubt his talent as a writer. And now news has come that his grandfather, the one relative he truly related to, has died. Now CJ returns to a family he hasn’t seen in years with nothing but his dog and a newfound faith in God that he hasn’t quite sorted out the details of yet. Matters are not made any easier by the fact everyone in CJ’s family and town is sure his novels are autobiographical.

Hunter’s Moon is a suspense story in which the characters hold center stage. Those characters include: CJ’s mother, whose own divorce and sadness has changed her, in CJ’s words, from June Cleaver to a hard drinking, chain smoking woman he hardly recognizes; a stuttering, some say simple-minded friend from the past, who coincidentally won a ton of money in the state lottery; a father who long since lost interest in being a father; the girl he should have asked to marry him now wed to his own cousin; and a brother whose political ambitions threaten to tear down the last vestiges of hope for the family and perhaps the town.

The spiritual insights in this story work their way out in a most natural and powerful way. The hero of the story struggles with the tension between grace and human responsibility. Ultimately he must learn what it means to forgive and be forgiven. And, like most of us, he has to learn these lessons the hard way. There are no canned answers in Hunter’s Moon, just really good questions.

Don Hoesel does a brilliant job of drawing us into one man’s realization that most secrets, especially family secrets, have a bad habit of resurrecting themselves at the most inopportune moments. And the secret CJ holds about his family may prove to be death of him. Or, it may just hold the key to a freedom he has yet to discover.

Reviewed by Tim George
Genre: Suspense
Publisher: Bethany House (review copy provided)
Publication Date: February 2010

when all you have is hope

Patrick Nolan is not the typical teenage boy. He is a good student, reasonably well grounded, and enjoys spending every free moment hanging out with his father. On one of their weekend rock climbing excursions father and son make a pact. The woman in their life has been asking for a patio for a very long time. Together they decide it is time to quit being so selfish and fulfill their promise. But, as they arrive home a neighbor meets them with grim news. The promise can never be realized because mother and wife has been found dead of an apparent suicide while they were gone.

In the weeks following the death, everything changes about the two men’s lives. And like typical men, both son and father seek to deny their pain by selling everything and moving to the mountains they both love to climb. What begins as a unique bonding experience ends up driving a wedge in their relationship that only something bigger than both of them can mend.

In High Places highlights yet another of Tom Morrisey’s real-life passions for adventure, the close-knit yet highly competitive world of climbing. As in his other adventure novels, Morrisey displays first-hand knowledge wrapped in expert prose. His stories suck you into a world, foreign to most of us, and leave you wishing you had gone there before. Blink and you will find yourself hanging from a piton dangling over the wilds of West Virginia.

Like the sport it depicts, this is not a safe story. While faith or lack thereof, is a key element in the lives of both Patrick and Kevin, there is no neat conclusion. Both father and son must confront the shallowness of their lives and the paths they choose. Written from the son’s point of view as he looks back on the defining period of his life, In High Places reads like a memoir. Deep questions are left unanswered leaving nothing left to cling to except hope. But hope, set on the right thing, is all we need to hold us even when we fall from the high places.

Reviewed by Tim George
Genre: Suspense
Publisher: Bethany House
Publication Date: March 2007

Be watching for my reviews of all these novels by Christy Award winner, Athol Dickson. Each review will contain clues that when put together might win you something very special, a complete set of Athol’s novels, autographed. Read, enjoy, and who knows? You might just be looking at a complete set of some of the best Christian fiction ever written on your book shelf.  The fun begins the first week in January with a winner to be announce in February 2010.