About clippings

Hi, I'm Michael Monhollon, the author of nine legal thrillers, seven of them featuring the fearless Robin Starling. What I like about Robin are her athleticism and her refusal to take personally the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." In the courtroom she is pure gladiator. The books in the series, in order, are Trial by Ambush, Juggling Evidence, Dog Law, Laughing Heirs, Devil in the Dock, Gone Ballistic, and Sexual Misconduct. I've always wanted to be a writer. For me it's been a growth process, though. In the fifth grade, when I and everyone I knew were reading the Hardy Boys, Mrs. Hortenstein assigned an essay on what we wanted to be when we grew up. My essay, too short, earned a D. 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 developed one, but careers have an unfortunate way of crowding out time to write. I was trained as a lawyer (University of Virginia Class of 1984) and have worked as a lawyer in Amarillo and Dallas, Texas, and in Richmond, Virginia. I continued to write when I could, and Penguin USA published my first book, Criminal Intent, in 1992, styling it as "the most shocking thriller since The Firm." It was not the bestselling thriller since The Firm (unfortunately), but with a real publication I was hooked on writing. Partly in search of writing time, I drifted into academia and, more recently, into retirement. In terms of my writing, the outlier is a novel based on the life of Jesus. 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. Give one of the Robin Starling stories a try. If you like it, please take time to write a 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... :-)