"Drone"

Mike Maden's lifelong fascination with history and politics ultimately led to a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Davis, focusing on the areas of conflict, technology and international relations. After brief stints as a campus lecturer, political consultant and media commentator, Maden turned to studies in theology and a decade of work with a Dallas-based non-profit where he eventually discovered screenwriting. Drone, the first book in Maden's new thriller series, is the result of a challenge by two published friends to try his hand at novel writing.

Maden applied the “Page 69 Test” to Drone and reported the following:

Drone is a military thriller but war is an extension of politics, so it’s terribly important that “politics” is accurately portrayed in a novel like this even though it isn’t a political thriller per se.

Page 69 of Drone lands on a terribly important plot point—a big reveal for some of the characters involved, chock full o’ dramatic irony because the attentive reader already has the piece of information that the characters on this page just now discover. For that reason alone, I’m not going to reproduce the page here. But it’s a good page to talk about briefly. President Margaret Myers is a decisive first term president because she comes to the job with extensive experience in the corporate world and state government. But the quality of one’s decisions can only be as good as the data points upon which they are built and President Myers is being presented with a number of possibilities but few concrete facts by her advisors. Something terrible has happened on American soil and the American president intends to do something about it. Her problem on page 69 is that her best analysts are reasonably certain about the identity of the culprits, but is that good enough information to act upon? President Myers has sworn to defend the nation but she has also sworn to uphold the law which is decidedly uncertain in this instance. She’s forced to choose between “justice” and “the law.” Which will prevail? Unfortunately, this dilemma is becoming increasingly common in our republic which is a tragedy since we are a “nation of laws” that strives for “justice for all.”

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My Book, The Movie: Drone by Mike Maden.

--Marshal Zeringue