Anna Erishkigal's blog

Killing Doctor Jon is the third book in the Jon's trilogy which hooked me in with The Anvil of the Craftsman and kept me hooked through The Britteridge Heresy and now this book, Killing Doctor Jon.

There are two main heroes throughout this series. The first hero, Jon Anthony, is a professor of theology at a Christian university with an unusual view of the difficulties in the Middle East. In Anvil he ran amok of a megalomaniac while in Iraq, and then in Britteridge he had to fend off a death threat by the megalomaniac's brother that followed him onto American soil. In Killing, once again Jon is forced to defend his beliefs, but he has a bit more mojo (view spoiler) to carry out his unusual evangelical beliefs. I'm not usually into Christian fiction because I usually find it used as an excuse to hate The Other, but I enjoyed Jon Anthony's mission, even if I don't necessarily believe every single thing he did, because Jon had an expansive view of God's work (i.e., the Craftsman) as including all good men, including good Muslims.

The second hero is my favorite fictional characters, Daniel Sean Ritter aka Kameldorn, an Air Force special forces soldier. What can I say? Mmmm.. hot, hunky super-spooky special-forces hero? The author probably won't appreciate a reader lusting after his Christian romance hero a-la paranormal romance style, so I'll focus instead on how 'in' Ritter's head you'll feel as you are forced to leave behind your wife, head into hostile territory, and ... lots of spoilers here so I can't say more. All I can say is Ritter/Kameldorn rocks and I've already dove into Ritter's story in Operation Naji.

Now for the villains. I enjoy a well-rounded villain. It's hard to write about Muslim terrorists without devolving into a kind of petty Islam-bashing or making them come across as moustache-twirling caricatures, but I thought the author did a nice job of helping me get inside the bad guy's head and examine some of the 'wrongful thinking' that might be inspiring Al Qaida and ISIS types to do terrible things. And ... there was one character who didn't turn out to be what I thought he'd be (given books 1 & 2) and I really enjoyed that.

So ... excellent Christian suspense thriller with a nice military fiction twist. Already got Operation Naji loaded onto my e-reader.