UNDER A SECRET SKY: A SPELL-BINDING MYSTERY

Author to hold local book signing Sept. 26

By David Madsen

Reviewed by Pennell Paugh

July 26, 2024 (San Diego) -- As a third generation Californian, David Madsen grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, one of the main settings for Under a Secret Sky. While researching the book, he traveled to the back gate of Area 51. Although he didn’t gain admittance, his license plate is no doubt in a secret database, which he accepts as a badge of honor. Today, the author lives in San Diego.

In the novel, Robert mysteriously disappears. His wife, Jean, and their precocious son, set out to find their missing family member. Threatened, then pursued by friends-turned-enemies, their search leads from their comfortable post-WWII suburban California life to a top-secret company town that invents a new way to win wars. 

Here is an excerpt from the book:

She would tell him tonight. You didn’t keep secrets from your husband. Ladies Home Journal insisted that an aura of mystery was the most important weapon a woman possessed. But the editors of those magazines, whose recipes she clipped but whose advice she never took, lived back East, not in California, rode elevators to work, dined out every night, and generally dismissed life as it was led in the rest of the country. It took hard work to be mysterious and energy to cover up.

“Bogey, two o’clock!”

Jimmy pointed to a flashing light twenty degrees to the northeast of the aircraft beacon on top of Black Mountain, the gentle sloping peak that overlooked the Bay Area peninsula.

"Approach speed estimated at one hundred, fifty-six knots, bearing one two, seven degrees. Still unidentified,” he said.

“Mom, did you hear me? This could be it.”

Jean looked at this eleven-and-a-half-year-old boy, so charged up with enthusiasm and arcane interests. His blue eyes were forever focused on horizons she couldn’t see. His blond-brown hair, dusted with a summer day’s adventures, straggled across his eyebrows; the only grooming techniques that worked on him were applied once a year by the school photographers. He was short for his age, so he had become a jumper, leaping up to grab at things that were out of his reach — canned goods on the top shelf, the ridges of doorframes, the flags their neighbors flew on holidays. Someday, perhaps, he would feel tall enough and stop jumping. That would be a sad day, she thought.

This beautifully written mystery is spell-binding. I loved the novel’s slow reveal of one secret after another. The characters hold secrets and potentials that I wanted to explore more deeply. And the mystery of all mysteries, that keeps the story in motion, is alluringly eerie. 

Madsen is the author of Black Plume: The Suppressed Memoirs of Edgar Allan Poe; U.S.S.A, a speculative mystery set in the American-occupied Soviet Union, which was a Book of the Month Club selection and translated into several languages; and Vodoun, a thriller that blends voodoo with American politics and the Haitian revolution.

Madsen also is a produced screenwriter with credits that include Copycat, the Warner Brothers thriller starring Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter.

David Madsen joins a fellow writer, Richard Opper, will be at Mysterious Galaxy bookstore in San Diego on September 26th to sign and discuss their books.