Customer Reviews

Monday Night Jihad

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I doubt that I would have ever found this book if I had not been told about it by a friend with whom I share an interest in various kinds of novels.

She had not read it, but she lives in Denver and the principal author of the book is Jason Elam, a member of the NFL Denver Broncos and their place kicker. She saw a review of the book in a local paper and mentioned that I might want to take a look at it. I did and I am very glad that I did so. It is a first rate novel on terrorisim that tells a gripping storty and that offers insight into that war that we are all involved in.

The principal figure in the book is Riley Covington. A former member of the USAF Special Operations Command seeing duty in Afghanastan and a graduate of the Air Force Academy, Covington has, after his tour of duty
been drafted by the Denver Mustangs and made the team as a linebacker.

Hakim Quasin is the antagonist of the story who, as a child, has seen his family bombed to dust in Operation Desert Storm and has sworn vengence on the United States. He is taken under the wing of a man known as "The Scorpion" who sees to it that the 12 year old Quasin is sent to Europe where the moulding process begins.

The planning begins to come to fruition as terrorists enter the United States with a plan to bring the war again to our shores. They are part of an organization known as The Cause.

Some former members of Covington's military unit are involved in trying to track them down and are closing in on some of them as they launch an attack at the Mall of America. Evidence obtained as a result of this action leads them to the belief that more is coming. But what?

Meanwhile, the Mustangs are preparing for an important league game on Monday Night Football. Unknown to anyone, so is The Cause. The attack is lauched during the game with much loss of life in a horrifying manner.

Covington is uninjured, but was very much in the middle of what transpired. As he contemplates what he witnessed "the question that dominated his mind was what could he do about what happened tonight? He hadn't asked to be drawn into this fight. In fact, he had left the Air Force Special Operations Command so that he wouldn't have to fight anymore. His days of ringing ears and dodging projectiles were supposed to be over."

"But now they had brought the fight back to him. They attacked his people. They had killed his friend."

These thoughts are the genisis of his return to special ops and the tracking down of the people responsible. The story spins out in a believable and compelling fashion and is very difficult to put down.

An interesting sidelight to this book is that Elam and his co-author are committed Christians. Their views on religion are shared in this work without being preachy or over bearing. They also have managed to write a book about some very tough people doing a very good job without using any profanity whatsoever. I was about a quarter of the way into the book before it dawned on me that I did not think they had used any swear words. Their committment to that shows that it can be done without distracting from the telling of the story.

This is a book that deserves to be read. I hope you do so and spread the word.

This is a well written and interesting thriller. I don't miss vulgarity or sex scenes. I like the way characters are not identified by race. I do not mind the protagonist being Christain and expressing his faith as a regular part of his life. My faith is Buddhist and I am a native born patriotic American who opposes terrorism as much as the protagonist does. However I have read several self-described Christian thrillers and I am concerned at the way the war on terrorism is characterized as a war between Jesus and his specifically Christian of a particular type followers and Allah and his followers rather than what seems a truer picture: a war between violent fanatics and people of goodwll of all faiths who believe in freedom of religon and other basic Americn ideals and principles of equality and democracy as contaned in our Constitution.
The inclusion of one good-guy Moslem does not do it for me as she is female and all females are marginalized and relegated to submissive roles in these books - and even though she is the real hero of the book (no spoiler from me). She has also expressed a lack of understanding of parts of the Q'ran, leaving openher conversion to the "true faith," which I am sure wll happen in a subsequent book.
For an audience who agrees with the political positions presented in the book, it is a good read. As a non-Christian person of faith who is alsp a patriotic American, those political positions scare me.

I picked up this book, hoping for a good read but dubious at the same time. Football and terrorism? And a new untried author to boot. Well, I was pleasantly surprised. The writing is decent. The action keeps you turning the pages, and there is actually a plot. The protagonist is a Christian, which gives a certain dimension to the character and the outworking of the plot, and the author is careful to keep his "bad guys" human; i.e., complex. You can actually feel sympathy for the Muslim terrorist, while at the same time seeing how what he believes is destructive. I am going to have my teen sons read this -- it will be a painless way for them to learn about Islam (in both the "terrorist" and a "moderate") -- and on top of all that, there is no bad language or questionable scenes that I would have to remove. Three cheers for "clean" authors who can really write!!!

Combine Air Force Special Ops, professional football, and a series of terrorist attacks launched by a deep undercover Muslim fanatic, and you have the red-blooded American tale of Monday Night Jihad. The terrorist attacks are launched against the Mall of America in Minneapolis and against a large stadium where a Monday night professional football game is about to be played. The counterattacks by the Special Ops teams take place in Europe. The denouement occurs in SoCal on the day of the Super Bowl. You can't get much better than that. The prose is about 8th grade level and quite smooth. There are no gratuitous sex scenes, and the main character is a born-again practicing Christian. The violence is gripping but not excessively graphic. This book is therefore a recommended read for mid-high and high school age males. Jason Elam is the veteran kick specialist of the Denver Broncos. His co-author, Steve Yohn, has a real gift for light action prose. You can read this book easily in one evening. Enjoy!

Jason Elam, a famous NFL placekicker for the Denver Broncos started writing a series of thriller novels once he retired from football. His stories are based on a professional football player named Riley Covington who gets pulled into an anti-terrorism unit after bombing attacks on US soil. Monday Night Jihad is the first book in the series and provides the background for Covington and his team whose stories have now stretched into three books (including "Blown Coverage" and "Black Out").

Elam doesn't write these books alone, he has partnered with his pastor, Steve Yohn, to help include a Christian element to the main character and to the story line. Elam says his purpose was to honor the real Jesus of the Bible and help correct those who have distorted his image. His second stated goal in writing this book was "to contrast the more radical elements of Islam with what I view as true Christianity."

Unfortunately those sections of the book where Riley Covington gets religious are mostly awkward. It would have been a more entertaining read without those elements, and as it stands I doubt that this novel really tackles the distortions of Jesus or informs about Islamic terrorists in such a way that it is a game changer for the readers.

I was also very distracted by the use of the PFL (Professional Football League) instead of the NFL. Elam copies NFL team cities, their colors, and reputations while making slight changes to their mascots. (The Detroit Lions are the Wildcats, the LA Raiders are the Bandits and the Denver Broncos are the Mustangs.) Possibly Elam isn't allowed to use actual NFL names in his writing, I'm not sure, but in not doing so he put in unnecessary speed bumps in the chapters that dealt with football. This was especially true when the PFL players were compared to real people who played in the NFL.

Other complaints had to do with the treatment of Muslim people and their religion. Although Elam attemtped to show some constraint by having a member on the anti-terrorist team be a Muslim it didn't work. This person's faith, though moderate, is presented as shallow. This story is pretty fear-based as it deals with the Islamic faith.

Though terrorism is a real issue today some of the responses to it in the book were unnecessary, including torture. There was more correction spent on careless agents than those who tortured information out of a prisoner. It certainly didn't come across as true Christianity.

I didn't care that the story was a bit far fetched, that it was full of testosterone, and that it hardly had any women in the book at all. I was entertained. I definitely did not want to put the book down once I started reading it as I was intrigued with the direction the story would go, despite the turnovers that I've mentioned above.

I wouldn't suggest this book to people trying to love Muslims, or to those trying to get a clearer picture of the Biblical Jesus. I would, however, read another one of these Riley Covington stories just for the machismo-loving fun of it.

This is a review of the Kindle Edition.
This is pretty good thriller but larded with come to Jesus Christianity and moralizing. The authors' purpose seems to be spreading the Word and only incidentally telling an interesting story. Lots of praying, superficial comparisons between Christianity and Islam, and football make this a tedious read sometimes but interesting enough that I didn't quit in the middle.

The story is of a terrorist planting bombs in crowds and a Christian football/terrorist fighter trying to bring him down. Since both stories are in the first person, the reader is able to understand the viewpoints, motivations and emotions of both characters. Even though able to understand the terrorist, one was still chilled to the bone.

The story was riviting. It made me want to race to the next page. It was difficult to put it down. Many times I had to quit reading in the middle of a chapter so I could go to sleep.

On another level, one story lets the reader see a Christian interacting in a real world filled with many kinds of people; believers, non-believers and all in between. The Islam part of the book describes in great detail the Moslem community and its hostility toward the Christian world, and the reasons for it.

One walks away understanding both sides and how far apart they really are, and probalby always will be.

A highly interesting and entertaining read.

In 1991 Baghdad, Hakeem lost his mother father, uncles and cousin to the American bombs and was taken to a camp where he was to become a mole living in the United States. He was brainwashed to avenge the death of his family and all those of Islam that the Americans killed in their war on terror. Hakeem settled into his American life waiting to be called to do his duty to Allah.

After Afghan duty, Second Lieutenant Riley Covington of the US Air Force Special Operations Command has become a valued linebacker for the football team the Colorado Mustangs. Hakeem's group partially succeeds at bombing the Mall of the American. His next mission is the stadium where the Mustangs are hosting a playoff game. Bombs go off and thousands are injured and killed including Riley's friend. As a reservist, Riley is called to find and put in a cage the mastermind, something he volunteered for; while Hakeem has one more site to hit before he is finished.

Former NFL kicker Jason Elam and Steve Yohn have written an exciting fast paced thriller that goes inside the mind of the terrorist to learn why they perform such horrific acts. The protagonist is a decent gentle man loved by his friends and feared by his enemies as he has no qualms about killing a killer who doesn't believe it is wrong to kill or maim thousands. Hakeem's handlers want America as the next country where suicide bombers operate with impunity. Readers will appreciate this action-packed thriller as Hakeem brings much more to the tale beyond the movie Black Sunday with the insight into his gut need for revenge accentuated by those who gave him three meals, a cot, and indoctrination.

Harriet Klausner

My dad sent me this book while I was in Iraq, I totally enjoyed it. Has a very good story line, and honestly really has some good info on how things work. Plus I am even happier to know there are 3 more after this one!! Keep up the good work Jason and Steve!!

I'm not a big football fan. I do like spy novels, but I can't say I ever read one before with a protagonist who was a linebacker. It's a bit different.

So our hero is Riley Covington. He's a graduate of the Air Force Academy who did a tour in Afghanistan as a Air Force Special Forces operator, then entered the ranks of the "PFL" or Professional Football League, as a player. Since he played in college for Air Force, everyone expected him to have an impact, and he does.

This was my first problem with the book: the hero is too much of a hero. He is tall, handsome, a war hero, and he goes to church every Sunday, doesn't smoke or drink, or eve swear.He's honest, a good friend, a natural leader, and of course he's so natural about all of this that he doesn't know all of these things, so he's awkward with girls. Yeah right! I hate him already.

So he's a football player, and the terrorists attack the stadium where his team is playing a game, killing hunddreds including his best friend. Naturally he wants revenge, and of course the government pretty much creates a spy/commando unit to help him. There's a plot twist, but I saw it coming a mile away, and I thought it was pretty obvious.

The book is reasonably well-written and enjoyable, so it's not bad but there's not much suspense.