Michael Monhollon

I've always wanted to be a writer, and murder mysteries, suspense novels, and courtroom dramas were my first love. For me it's been a growth process, though. In the fifth grade, when I and everyone I knew were reading the Hardy Boys mysteries, Mrs. Hortenstein assigned an essay on what we wanted to be when we grew up. My essay about wanting to become a mystery writer earned a D, at least in part (I tell myself) because it was just too short. In high school I began to read more science fiction than mystery novels, and I stopped out a semester in college to write science fiction short stories and collect rejection slips. My father insisted I needed a career to fall back on, and so I finished college and went to law school, but legal careers have an unfortunate way of crowding out time to write.

Tightly plotted books with engaging characters and a big payoff at the end—those were the kind of books that as a boy kept me tucked in odd corners of the house reading when I should have been doing almost anything else. My writing career began modestly, when, as a fifth-grader, I earned a D on an essay about wanting to be a writer. I was more encouraged when Signet published my first novel, Criminal Intent, and I left my law practice for teaching and writing.

In terms of my writing, the outlier is a novel based on the life of Jesus, which has nothing to do with courtrooms and lawyers (unless we count the scribes as lawyers). Divine Invasion is not a parody, but a straight narrative account with a little juggling of the time element. For example: When Pilate provoked a riot by marching his soldiers into Jerusalem with his standards bearing the bust of the emperor, it was almost certainly prior to the beginning of Jesus' public life. Because the building tensions between Pilate and the Sanhedrin are part of Jesus' story, I moved the incident into the timeline of my novel. My other liberties revolve mostly around assigning personalities and personal characteristics to historical figures, including Jesus, his followers, Pilate, Caiaphas, Herod Antipas, and others. Some aspects of personality are apparent in the dialog in the gospel accounts, of course, but where the historical record is silent, I have relied on my imagination to fill in the details. In 1998, Booklist, the trade journal of the American Library Association, listed it as one of the top ten Christian novels of the year.

If you give one of my books a try and like it, please take time to post a book review on Amazon to serve as a guidepost to others in search of a good read. If you don't like it, of course, I wouldn't want to intrude on your busy schedule... :-)