Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(Outskirts Press, 2025). ISBN: 978-1-9772-7562-2 A tried and true adage for first-time novelists is write what you know. Writing novels is a difficult endeavor (as W. Somerset Maugham famously quipped, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are”) and the seasoned author controls everything they can. According to George Yuhasz’s back-cover bio, he is a “former US Government special agent, intelligence officer, and contractor. He has also worked in the private sector as an investigator and security consultant.” It is clear he wrote about what he knows in Righteous Allegiance , which takes far-right White Christian Nationalism, especially among former members of the military, as its central subject. Written with the technical expertise of an insider (I mentored a novelist for many years who was a former lieutenant colonel in Army intelligence, and I recognize the signs), Righteous Allegiance is topical and frightening. Yuhasz’s extremists ar...

  (A Mike Stoneman Thriller, KDP, 2018). ISBN: 9781723898730 One of the challenges and joys of genre writing is employing a plethora of tried-and-true tropes while bringing in something original and ultimately unexpected. This is hard enough to do with larger genres like the crime thriller, never mind drilling down into smaller loops of the spiral, into the police procedural and, in the case of Righteous Assassin , into the serial killer police procedural. Within a few pages of Righteous Assassin , I felt deeply at home—not only because I teach about and have written numerous thrillers for the stage, page, screen, and Escape Rooms—but because Chapman was employing all of the genre’s prevalent tropes. His lead character, Mike Stoneman, is a hard-nosed Manhattan police detective who is single, impatient, and given to holding everyone around him to the high standards to which he holds himself. Consider his last name, Stone man, which is like Willy Lo man in Arthur Miller’s Death o...