Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

  “The Benefits of Writing (and Reading) a Series”: A Review of Double Takedown , by Kevin G. Chapman (A Mike Stoneman Thriller, First Legacy Publishing, 2024). ISBN: 978-1-958339-21-3 In April 2022, I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing the first book in what is now a six-book series. Righteous Assassin , which introduced Manhattan detective Mike Stoneman, is a hard-hitting police procedural that employs all of the tropes one would expect in this popular genre. Stoneman himself is a trope—single, impatient, difficult to please, untrusting, and intensely hard on himself. His job is his life, and he takes it seriously (just consider his name: Stone man). Stoneman’s introduction is compounded by his being assigned a new partner, Jason Dickson—a fast-rising Black man, which leads to accusations of affirmative action over merit. Despite their lack of trust in each other (which creates a nice underlying tension in Righteous Assassin ), they manage to work well enough together to...

  “Spiritual Combat in a Gritty Thriller”: A Review of The Karma Factor by Thomas Lane (2023). ISBN: 978-1-958848-21-0 Beautifully bound in a 7.5 × 9.25 inch hardcover edition, Thomas Lane’s debut novel is a fast-paced thriller with deep, compelling roots in the spiritual realms of Karma, reincarnation, and the Akashic Record. With the popularity of the timeline-jumping, what’s-the-nature-of-reality, can-you-change-the-future programming created by the likes of JJ Abrams, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, and Steven Moffat, audiences in the 2020s are more knowledgeable about nontraditional storytelling than ever and are eager to take the leap into the dark, churning waters at the nexus of spirituality, philosophy, and advanced technology. Netflix series like Russian Doll , Archive 81 , and the German-language Dark and 1899 rely on this audience education and interest, pulling no punches on the profound implications of our choices, the nature of reality, and the dangers of mani...

  (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...