House of Wolves by Matt Bronleewe

This week, the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance introduces

House Of Wolves
Thomas Nelson (August 12, 2008)
by Matt Bronleewe

I recommend House of Wolves. Highly entertaining! Matt is becoming an excellent adventure/suspense novelist!
---Vicki

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
The former member of the band Jars of Clay, has earned numerous awards producing and co-writing albums that have sold a combined total of over 20 million copies. His songs have recently been recorded by Disney pop sensations Aly & AJ, American Idol finalist Kimberley Locke, and more. Bronleewe has worked with Grammy Award-winning artists such as Michael W. Smith, International pop singer Natalie Imbruglia and Heroes star Hayden Panettiere. Born in Dallas, Texas, Bronleewe was raised on a farm in Kansas, where he lived until he left for college in 1992. At Greenville College in Illinois, Bronleewe formed the band Jars of Clay with his dorm roommate and two neighbors, and the group soon found success. Though Bronleewe opted to leave Jars of Clay early on to pursue an academic career, he soon found himself in Nashville, co-writing, producing, and playing music professionally. To add to his list of accomplishments, Bronleewe has expanded his love of story telling beyond music into authorship. He is currently penning a 5 book series for Thomas Nelson Fiction. His first book Illuminated began the adventurous series about rare manuscripts and the mysteries within. Bronleewe currently resides in Brentwood, Tenn., with his wife and three children. He continues to write and produce music, and he also volunteers through his church to help disadvantaged youth in the community. Bronleewe enjoys reading, taste-testing good food and watching sports, as well as indulging his interests in art, architecture, design and science.

ABOUT THE BOOK
A mysterious book with a dangerous secret. An evil brotherhood out to conquer the world. One man stands between them . . . with his family in the balance. In the twelfth century, Henry the Lion collected the rarest relics in Christendom. And to protect his most precious acquisitions, he encoded the whereabouts in a gorgeous illuminated manuscript called The Gospels of Henry the Lion. The manuscript has been showing up and disappearing ever since. No one knows where the relic has been hidden . . . or its ultimate power. Only one man holds the key to the mystery. He's carrying it in his briefcase at his son's school for show-and-tell, and he thinks it's a fake. But he's about to find out just how real it is. Because the wolves are rapidly closing in. And if August Adams can't decode the secret in time, the world's balance of power will forever be altered.
If you would like to read an excerpt of House Of Wolves, it will be HERE Matt can be reached through the Contact link on his Website.

Book Review Round-Up

The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, by Elise Blackwell,Unbridled Books Publisher. March 2007.

Excellent literary novel written by Elise Blackwell, Creative Writing teacher at the University of South Carolina. She writes beautifully, even though her subject is the flooding of communities around New Orleans in 1926. Naturally, you can't forget the recent disaster in New Orleans as you read the novel. One theme: History repeats itself, if we refuse to learn from it. "









"Secrets From Lulu's Cafe, Desperate Pastors' Wives," by Ginger Kolbaba & Christy Scannell, Howard Fiction, publisher, 2007.

The title is a little "off-putting," but I think this book probably has more depth than its cover betrays.

Looks to be a very honest portrayal of the difficulties pastors' wives have dealing with the problems of living life: except, that we expect, no, demand is more likely, that they be perfect. No mistakes allowed, and "she'd better speak to me first!"









The Watchers, by Mark Anderson Olsen, bestselling author of The Assignment, Bethany House, 2007.
This is an excellent 'spiritual thriller. It has the high-stakes suspense similar to "Left Behind" series, but the writing is excellent. I love the opening passage that describes a murder scene through the unusual perspective of a freshly, but bloodied, murdered woman!

"The blue flickers of her television danced across the housekeeper's unmoving pupils. She never budged a muscle, nor leveled the odd tilt of her head, nor wiped the crimson trickles crisscrossing her neck, nor rose from the stain darkening the sofa cushions beneath her. Nor did she notice that, twenty feet away, a man gripping the weapon of her murder had now reached the bedroom door of her 'angelic one... No, deep in the final tremors of her death, the housekeeper did not hear her assailant turn the bedroom's door handle or seem him enter the room. Nor did she scream when he took two padded strides into shadow."

And it gets much more intense after that.






Sacred Causes, The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh, HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.


An excellent social history detailing how religion can be usurped and camouflaged by politics. A favorite tantalizing thought: "The 1960s era brought to the forefront "forces that seemed to be turning Europe into a post-Christian desert, in which "wisdom" would be represented by the lyrics of John Lennon."