Into a Dark Frontier

July 31, 2017
Mangan’s debut reads like he couldn’t get the words out and onto the page fast enough, which translates into a sometimes clumsy but blazingly fast and fun action thriller. In the near future, former Navy SEAL Slade Crawford takes a fundamentalist Christian community, the Judeans, into his care and promises to shepherd them to their promised land, in this case Africa. Unfortunately, a Muslim-Christian war has reduced the entire continent to a failed state, and more than 400 million people have died. Those that remain are “the worst of the worst—the psychopaths and apex predators.” Slade fights his way across Africa, dodging an insane blood cult known as the Penitents until they kidnap one of his Judeans, Elizabeth Brightman, and Slade has to disappear into lawless Nairobi to rescue her from the brothel where she’s being kept as a sex slave. The quality of the writing veers wildly between abysmal and impressive, but the fight scenes are top-notch and an open ending promises more adventures for Slade. Agent: Bob Diforio, D4EO Literary Agency.