Story from Senior Life newspaper

The following story by Barb Sieminski appeared in the October 2012 issue of Senior Life newspaper.





















Fort Wayne residents might be intrigued to know that their mostly law-abiding town boasts two, um, somewhat unsavory sisters who, although pious (they live in the City of Churches, after all), also enjoy plotting gruesome murders and vicariously commingling with torturers who harbor kinky underwear fetishes. They sweetly concoct various poisons, arrange spectacular car explosions and shatter hapless victims with .38 Special hollow-point bullets — and yet never serve a day in prison for the collateral damage resulting from their fertile imaginations.

Meet Johnine Brown and Margaret Yoder, two talented murder mystery authors, who together total one: Margarite St. John. The nom de plume is a composite of their names, which, according to Brown, “sounds more sophisticated than our real names.”

The Iowa-born siblings, who received straight As in English, have been collaborating on their evil plots for three years and currently have published five murder mysteries digitally and in paper form, either of which can be purchased through Amazon. They are nearly finished with the sixth mystery — a Christmas novella — and have also printed a non-fiction work. Their books feature not only various Fort Wayne landmarks throughout but also those from their travels, particularly in the deep south.

Brown, who is 16 years older than Yoder, is a retired lawyer and former assistant professor of Chicago State University’s English Department; she possesses several degrees including a bachelor of arts in psychology, master of science in English lit, Ph.D. in English language and lit, and Juris Doctor in Law. She has two children and five grandchildren and enjoys jewelry-making and reading. Yoder, with a bachelor of arts in education degree from Indiana University at Fort Wayne, taught school and worked in the pulmonary department at the Indiana University Hospital in Indianapolis. She and her surgeon husband have three children, and in her spare time she leads a Bible study group, does crossword puzzles and reads.

“When our first mystery novel was published on Kindle, we were, respectively, 55 and 71 years old,” said Yoder. “We’re not getting any younger, but we’re still partnering, and it takes us about four months of writing plus one or two of writing text copy, designing the cover, editing the text, and proofreading the final manuscript, plus overseeing the transfer to other software platforms for publication.”

Christening themselves The Scribe (Brown) and The Storyteller (Yoder), the duo regularly meets for coffee to strategize new, darkly witty plots and to create more novels for their hungry fan base.

Asked if they were aficionados of the CSI crime television series, Brown said no; their preferences lean toward true crime shows dealing with forensics, police procedure, investigative techniques, FBI, profiling and trial work as well as fascination with history and military channels. Their interest is focused on domestic crimes and “some kinds of serial murderers” rather than on drug, gang, random or organized crime, according to Brown.

Last month (September), the duo proudly received the American Author Award from ReviveWorldMedia. For more information on, or to purchase their books, visit their website at www.margaritestjohn.com/.

“Our most thrilling publishing moment was seeing our first book, ‘Face Off,’ in print. We are grateful that God gave each of us half a gift — storytelling for Margaret and writing the story into a novel for me,” said Brown. “Each of us being blessed with half a gift prevents our taking excessive pride in our work.”

The eerie connection between real life and fiction

Writing murder mysteries is full of eerie coincidences.  As we’ve all heard, real life is stranger than fiction and life imitates art. Sometimes, we can't tell whether real life really is stranger than fiction or where it's art imitating life.

When we wrote Murder for Old Times’ Sake, our third mystery novel, we thought we were creating a unique central character, a respectable man who breaks into houses and steals women’s underwear, then graduates to rape and murder.  He photographs himself wearing the underwear and then keeps the lingerie as souvenirs.  No one, not even his wife, has the slightest suspicion of his evil nature.

We thought the combination of an underwear fetish with a respectable facade and successful career, not to mention the range of crimes -- from breaking and entering to rape and murder -- was credible but strikingly unusual.  

Imagine our surprise when, months after publishing our novel, we watched a true-crime show about Colonel Russell Williams.  A respected officer in the Canadian Forces, after leading an apparently law-abiding life, Williams started breaking into women’s homes and stealing their underwear -- which he photographed himself wearing in some of the most perverted and darkly hilarious images we’ve ever seen.  Then his crimes escalated to kidnapping, torture, rape and murder. 

Colonel Williams went undetected for a long time because of his apparent rectitude.  He was a hero, the public thought, not a pervert.  A decorated military pilot, Williams commanded Canada’s largest military airbase.  He flew VIP aircraft for such dignitaries as the Prime Minister and Queen Elizabeth II.  He was well-educated, married and lived an outwardly normal life.  His hobbies were normal -- fishing, photography, running, and golf.   Nothing about him gave rise to suspicions about just how evil he really was.   

We didn’t make our character in Murder for Old Times’ Sake a military man, and we didn’t have him break into women’s houses 82 times -- but we did, all unknowingly, make him a runner and golfer, just like Col. Williams, a much-admired man with the same underwear fetish and a burning need to maintain the facade of respectability. 

We had a somewhat similar experience after publishing our first novel, Face Off.  In our story, a respectable man’s wife dies by drowning.  Everyone, including his closest friends, believes she was his first wife.  What no one knows for a long time is that he’d been married before, in Germany, to a woman who died the same way.  For us, the manner of multiple deaths established an interesting pattern common to serial murderers:  whatever works the first time, if undetected, will be used again and again. 

Then we discovered the story of Michael Peterson, a novelist whose wife allegedly died falling down the stairs.  She wasn’t his first wife, as it turned out.  The first one died in Germany after falling down the stairs.  In a forensically difficult case, the pattern of deaths helped convince the jury that Peterson had killed his second wife -- just as it convinces our detective in Face Off that a third wife is about to drown.

Tarot cards -- good, bad, or indifferent?

In our fifth novel, Hot as a Firecracker, Tarot cards play a big role as clues to the motives and identity of a murderer. 

We had heard about Tarot before but never thought about it other than as an occult legacy from the Middle Ages.  In fact, the Scribe had once had her cards read by a friend at a party (actually, by the mother of a fairly famous actor), but the experience left no mark.  The Scribe was a skeptic even then.

We had several reasons for including Tarot.  Mama Bee, the palm reader in Murder for Old Times’ Sake, was too good a character to abandon.  And the public is now fascinated with the occult, hence the popularity of werewolf, vampire, zombie, ghost, and other occult stories.  Furthermore, the Bible predicts the rise of occult practices and other heresies in the days preceding the Second Coming. 

So we bought a pack of Tarot cards and a companion booklet explaining their use.  As soon as they arrived, we unwrapped the package, took out the cards, and looked at them one by one.  The cards are beautiful, inscrutable, and alarming in equal measure.  We can’t explain why, but the images made us uneasy.  Perhaps it was the thought that knowledge of the future is forbidden and some Tarot enthusiasts believe that that’s what the cards reveal by disclosing the spiritual trends in a person’s life.

We handled the cards as if they were snakes and joked darkly, nervously about their meaning. 

The next morning, the Storyteller sister woke up with a severely swollen, rashy face.  She vowed never to look at, let alone touch, the cards again.

The Scribe sister had no choice but to figure out a meaningful spread for the reading Mama Bee would give to an important character early in the book, so she spent several days with the cards and the booklet.  A few days later, at a peaceful, happy dinner with friends, the Scribe had the first -- and only -- panic attack of her life.  She could take air in but not expel it.  Try as she would, she could not exhale.  She felt herself blowing up like a balloon with no release.  The attack felt like suffocation from oxygen rather than from the lack of it.

The plot of our fifth mystery novel required two more readings, but the Scribe refused to lay out the cards again.  Her real-life reaction to the first spread became the model for Mama Bee’s hysterical response to the second fictional reading. 

Do Tarot cards emanate something evil, a breath from the underworld?  Or were our responses simply a physical manifestation of our fear of them? 

Sisters write city into novels

Photos by Samuel Hoffman | The Journal Gazette

Johnine Brown, left, and Margaret Yoder write novels as Margarite St. John.

Familiar Settings

Sisters put city spots, mentality into 2 novels

Jaclyn Youhana | The Journal Gazette

“Murder for Old Times’ Sake” is the first of two locally based novels.

Lexie Royce is a 1994 Carroll High School grad. Her family owns a scrap metal yard. She dines at favorites such as Biaggi’s and Club Soda, and her nothing-but-trouble ex-husband is a professor at IPFW who is sleeping with a student who uses his money to buy jackets from Pappas Furs.

Oh yes, and her brother hired someone to blow up her car. And she’s a victim of the Panty Raider, that kinky thief who sneaks into women’s apartments and makes off with all their lingerie.

All of the above is fictional.

Royce, for all her Fort Wayne ties and history, is fictional, the product of Fort Wayne sisters Johnine Brown, 72, and Margaret Yoder, 56. The women are working on their fifth book, and all are written under the pseudonym Margarite St. John.

“I just thought (the pseudonym) sounds sexy,” Yoder says. “Who wants to read a mystery by ‘Margaret Yoder’?”

Yoder has lived in Fort Wayne since she was 13. She lives with her husband and has three grown children. One of the most important things in her day-to-day life is the Bible study she leads.

Her sister, who lives on her own, moved here in 2001 to be near family after she retired from her law practice in Chicago. A year or two after Brown moved to Fort Wayne, she came to that realization so many retirees seem to find: She was bored.

Brown has a Ph.D. in literature, though she had never considered writing before; she had trouble coming up with the actual plots. That’s where Yoder comes in. She’s the idea woman, the half of Margarite St. John who comes up with the “What happened next?”

Each woman considers the other her best friend, and they’ve found that they work well together – perhaps in part because each has such a specific role to play in the writing process. They meet periodically throughout the week to brainstorm ideas, either in Brown’s library or Yoder’s sunroom. They share ideas, discuss current events and think out how they might tie those into their stories. Brown will take time to write up a few chapters, and she shares them with Yoder. The chapters are further brainstormed, and Brown makes any changes needed.

Were they to actually try and write the chapters together, the process wouldn’t work, both say. It would be too difficult to write with the other hovering over her sister’s shoulder.

“Murder for Old Times’ Sake” is the first of two mysteries starring Lexie Royce, and it is chock full of Fort Wayne references and shout-outs.

Setting

The bulk of the action does take place in the Summit City. Picking a Midwestern setting in lieu of the bright lights of New York or laid back appeal of Los Angeles was a deliberate choice.

“People think all the excitement happens on the coast,” Yoder says.

“This part of the country is called ‘flyover country,’ ” Brown says.

And the sisters get specific with their shout-outs: Character Lexie Royce is called one of the most eligible women in the country by “Fort Wayne Monthly”; she dines at Club Soda on a date, at Biaggi’s with a friend for lunch; Royce’s lawyer’s offices are on the 18th floor of the Lincoln Tower, and he built a mansion in Sycamore Hills.

Mindset

Many of the characters’ views of Fort Wayne are the oft-heard thoughts of many a Fort Wayne native.

“Every other part of America was déclassé, especially the Midwest, most especially Fort Wayne, his hometown.” The opinion is thought by a high power lawyer with a fancy Columbia University degree as he is flipping through his alumni magazine, scowling with jealousy at all his classmates accomplished while he got stuck in Fort Wayne. Brown pulled the idea of this scene from first-hand experience: She graduated from Barnard College, Columbia’s sister school.

“I know how those people think about the Midwest,” she says, and Yoder adds, “She reads (her alumni magazine) to me, and we just laugh. It’s so pompous.”

Lexie is catching up with an old friend when he remembers that time she backed into a streetlight in high school. While she is considered a high-powered woman of means elsewhere, in Fort Wayne, she’s the same girl she was in high school.

“… a girl from Fort Wayne, an undistinguished city that sat on a featureless prairie enclosed within a dome of gray clouds, where he now found himself stuck like a horse with its head caught in a barbed wire fence.” This is Lexie’s ex-husband’s lament about getting stuck in the Fort. The simple thought process behind the line?

“November in Fort Wayne is just iron gray,” Yoder says.

Sites to come

Yoder and Brown both love living in Fort Wayne, and they enjoy the shout-outs they can provide through their novels. Their dog groomer even makes a cameo in the book.

Brown has a few ideas of other sites she wants to give some lip service to eventually: a TinCaps game (she went for the first time last summer and loved it), the Embassy Theatre (it would be nice to work in the new conductor), the Fort Wayne Museum of Art.

“I love it,” Yoder says of Fort Wayne. “I think it’s a very safe place. You always hear it’s a good place to raise a family.”

“I moved from Chicago,” Brown adds. “Fort Wayne is sweet.”

For example: When her daughter flies into the Fort Wayne International Airport to visit, she is handed a cookie.

They don’t even make her pay for it.

jyouhana@jg.net

TV interview

Margaret Yoder and Johnine Brown, writing murder mysteries under the pen name Margarite St. John, were interviewed on live television (WANE-TV) by Adam Widener and Nicholas Ferreri on Sunday, April 22, 2012. 

The interview only took a couple of minutes but it was fun for the authors, as you’ll see by watching the video below:

Dupont Valley Times article

Recently we were the subject of a feature article by Kelly McLendon in the Dupont Valley Times. Click here to read the article.

Newest Murder Mystery

Two sisters, using the pen name Margarite St. John -- the Storyteller and the Scribe -- have published their fourth murder mystery, The Girl with a Curl.  It follows Murder for Old Times’ Sake, and while both mysteries are set in Fort Wayne and feature many of the same characters, each story stands alone.

Our Novels

Novel 4

The Girl with a Curl is the story of Lexie Royce and Steve Wright (the principals in Murder for Old Times’ Sake) shortly after their marriage.  They are consumed with the stumbling stones of everyday life -- furnishing a new house, training a rambunctious puppy, hiring staff, pursuing business interests in a bad economy, and getting pregnant. 

When they learn from a newspaper announcement that Antoinette “Tawny” Delamarter died of poison at Scuttlebutt’s, a gentlemen’s club in Fort Wayne, they merely note it in passing.  After all, Tawny -- the skank of the Carroll High School class of ’94, an exotic dancer with a “generous” reputation -- was not a friend. 

But then, they learn, Tawny is survived by a teen-aged daughter, the wild-child Jacintha Caitlin, who is on a quest to find her biological father.  Her only clue is a scrapbook Tawny had hidden for sixteen years.  And her only help comes from Dover Pitt, a disillusioned school counselor who thinks of the Amy Winehouse clone as a curse but is always trying to do the right thing for even the most rebellious students.  His search for Jacintha’s father leads to a whole new life, not only for the orphan but for himself as well.

The good-hearted Lexie, who like Jacintha lost her mother at a tender age and who favors personal (but anonymous) forms of charity, is always ready to help an orphan.  Jacintha’s transformation from the ugly and neglected scullery girl to the beautiful princess ensconced in the tower bedroom is the stuff of fairy tales.  But like a fairy tale, the transformation from Jacintha, the trailer-park delinquent who bowls, to JayCee, the country club darling who golfs, is punctuated with evil in all its darkest forms.

Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, chaos follows Lexie’s decision to help Jacintha.  The innocent are falsely accused, old friends lose their jobs, loving marriages are torn apart, and murder victims appear in odd places. 

The murderer has left a trail of clues but has nevertheless been too clever for the legal system.  If the police can’t bring the evil acts to an end, who will?  Two silver mementoes that were never meant to be found hold the answer for the unlikeliest of kinsman avengers.

Some of the memorable characters in Murder for Old Times’ Sake figure in this new murder mystery:  Phyllis Whitlow, her son Drago and and his wife Lucy Bott; Dave Powers, a police detective, and his wife Sheila; Jean Arnold, Lexie’s executive assistant; Trude Weide, the eccentric Scrapyard maven who raises Shelties; Ed and Jessica Singer, Steve and Lexie’s good friends; and Duke Simmons, the best criminal defense lawyer in northeast Indiana.  Even Matilda Royce, Lexie’s acerbic step-mother, makes a brief appearance.  

But there are memorable new characters as well, especially Dover Pitt, the disillusioned school counselor who wants to be a golf pro; Todd Fingerhutt, the pool man who knows a lot of facts, some of which are true; Joey DeWitt and Libby Stuart, Jacintha’s attractive new friends; Percy Scutter, the surprisingly respectable owner of Scuttlebutt’s, and Jen Ricky, a pregnant dancer who worked with Tawny; and last but not least, the shape-shifting JayCee Delamarter, the apple of her new dad’s eye.

Novel 3
Murder for Old Times’ Sake introduced 33-year-old Alexandra “Lexie” Royce, who has everything.  She’s beautiful, smart, and single again.  As a self-made millionaire, her fame extends far beyond Fort Wayne.  Best of all, she has just been reunited with her old boyfriend, Steve Wright.  So what could go wrong?
 

Plenty, as it turns out, starting with her fortune.  Her step-mother, half-brother, ex-husband, and financial advisor all want a piece of it.  And they’ll do almost anything to get it. 

Lexie’s romance with Steve doesn’t go smoothly either.  Not only is he reluctant to marry again, but two other women are vying for his affections:  Vicki Grinderman, a pretty young paralegal who fancies herself a New Age priestess, and Jean Arnold, Lexie’s own executive assistant, who has a drinking problem.     
 

When a sexual pervert begins stealing women’s lingerie and then two women are murdered, Lexie suddenly realizes she’s in danger too.  In fear for her life, Lexie retreats to the safety of a fabulous but creepy lodge in the Upper Peninsula.  Hearing that one of her stalkers left a suicide note confessing to the earlier murders, she begins to relax -- only to be lured into the killer’s trap.

 

* * * * *

Both Murder for Old Times’ Sake and The Girl with a Curl are set in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the country’s much neglected heartland -- aka fly-over country for the coastal elite. 

The neglect of Fort Wayne in modern popular literature is strange.  The ratio of millionaires to the population is one of the highest in the country, so there are lots of readers here who can afford to buy books.  The first professional baseball game -- our all-American sport -- was played here in 1871.  We know the city has international importance because Hitler reportedly placed Fort Wayne seventh on his list of U.S. cities to be destroyed.  Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of the world’s first working television system, toiled over his inventions in a basement lab on Pontiac Street.  And if “Mad” Anthony Wayne, for whom the city is named, hadn’t crushed the French and Indians in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, we’d all be talking through our noses, smoking without guilt, bathing less often, eating richer food, walking our poodles, and drinking lots more wine at lunch. 

* * * * *

Margarite St. John’s first two books, Face Off and Monuments to Murder, are set in southwest Florida, where the sisters -- and many other Midwesterners -- like to vacation or retire.

Novel 1

In Face Off, Lily Anderson, a pretty, self-assured career woman living in Fort Wayne, is facing problems in the law firm where she’s the office manager.  She’s also sick of living so far from her only sister.  She wants a better work environment, warmer weather, and marriage before she turns 30.

During Christmas vacation at her sister’s house on Marco Island, she impulsively decides to change everything in her life.  Moving to Florida and finding a better job turn out to be easier than choosing the right husband from among three eligible men:  Jack Moon, her long-time boyfriend, the lead guitarist in The Fly-Over Boys; Tom Lawton, an ambitious detective, fresh from a broken engagement, whom she meets on the flight to Fort Myers; and Dr. Bruce Blackburn, a rich, widowed surgeon who is also her brother-in-law’s partner and old friend.  All three love her, but which one can she trust?

Accidentally discovering the truth about one of the men, misled by gossip about another, and kept in the dark about the past of the third, Lily finally makes her choice.  Not until she takes a fateful midnight cruise on a cigarette boat named Face Off does she learn the truth about the men in her life -- and her own heart. 

Novel 2

In Monuments to Murder, Jerry Lee Beaudry, a rich widow famous for her opulent gardens in Naples, Florida, is on a quest to find the traitor who published a false abortion story about her daughter, Poppy Beaudry McBride, a former beauty queen.  The abortion scandal imperils the future of Poppy’s husband, Ferrin, a conservative politician running for reelection against the smarmy Myron Mullett. 

Jerry Lee will do anything to find and punish the leaker.  She thinks the only people who know about Poppy’s miscarriage are her brother Verlin Grubbs, a savant who knows everything there is to know about herbs; Dr. Collin Lindstrom, who treated Poppy in the emergency room; Dewey Betz, the boy who made Poppy pregnant; and Molly Standardt, Poppy’s beauty pageant rival, now a gossip columnist.  Phil Coker, the washed-up Hollywood actor who is her live-in companion, knows too, of course, but he wouldn’t talk.  When she finds out she’s wrong about Phil, there’s hell to pay.

Molly Standardt sets out to rehabilitate Poppy’s reputation.  And Tom Lawton is hired by Poppy’s husband to find the leaker.  Together, Molly and Tom not only plumb the depths of Jerry Lee’s ruthless ambition and find the leaker but also expose an unholy alliance between Hollywood moguls and radical politicians.

The beautiful monuments, the mausoleum, and the deadly herbs in Jerry Lee’s famous gardens, as well as her strange brother Verlin, say more about Jerry Lee than even her daughter knows.  When Poppy sets out to expose her mother’s dark deeds, she knows it’s dangerous -- but has no idea of the peril that awaits her.  Nor can Jerry Lee, who expects her life to be immortalized in film, guess what kind of film it will be.  

Some of the memorable characters in Face Off figure in this new murder mystery:  Lily Anderson and the detective Tom Lawton; Molly Standardt, the gossip columnist; Sara Bancroft, Lily’s sister; Matt Bearsall, a detective; Simon Diodorus, a society walker;  Verbena Cross, an aging Hollywood actress, and her body-double, Margaret Greer.  

But there are memorable new characters as well, especially Jerry Lee, her brother Verlin, and her companion Phil Coker; Poppy McBride and her husband Ferrin, a Congressman running for reelection; Dee Applegate, Molly’s flamboyant mother; Myron Mullett, his wife LuAnn and his mistress Muffy Wayne; Doris Bearsall, Matt’s conservative wife; Virgil Goldstein, a left-wing Hollywood mogul, and his wife Ellen Matter.

Sub-genres

It is hard to say what sub-genre of murder mysteries our books belong to.  Some might say cozy mysteries because there’s plenty of romance, not to mention characters from all walks of life, travel to interesting places, and the intimate details of everyday life.  Like most writers of cozy mysteries, we only hint at gore and sex and merely sketch police procedure.

Some might categorize our mysteries as woman-in-peril tales.  All our books feature intelligent, attractive women -- Lily Anderson, Poppy McBride, Lexie Royce -- whose lives are imperiled by people they trust.  By the time they spot the evil nature lurking behind a respectable facade, it’s almost too late. 

And all our books feature villains who are hoist with their own petard (French for a small bomb used to breach walls in fortifications).  Sometimes petards, which were activated with a match used as a slow fuse, detonated prematurely, blowing up the engineer.  William Shakespeare used the phrase “hoist with his own petard” in Hamlet to describe the reversal by which the bearers of a death warrant against Hamlet were executed in his place when the letters were altered. 

Our villains, whether men or women, are blown up by their own evil designs -- in one case, literally. 

Perhaps, then, there needs to be a new sub-genre:  the cozy bomb mystery.

Book Recommendations

We read widely.  Our taste includes not just murder mysteries but many other categories of both fiction and non-fiction.  From time to time we will publish book recommendations.  Here are a few of the Scribe’s current favorites.  All are available through Amazon for Kindle and in paper.

Fiction

* The Devlin Diary, Christi Phillips.  The Devlin Diary picks up where The Rossetti Letter left off. The story bounces between Claire Donavan, a modern scholar in Cambridge, and Hannah Devlin, an unlicensed doctor in 17th century London. Both women confront danger, prejudice, and mystery involving the powerful and unscrupulous. The historical research is superb, rendering the 17th century characters, settings, plots, politics, professions, science, morals, mind-sets, and details far more intriguing than the current ones, but both time periods held my interest. Until the last chapters, I was unsure of how either story would end but found both conclusions very satisfying.

* I’ve Got Your Number, Sophie Kinsella.  Kinsella is the author of the popular Shopaholic series featuring the delightful and unconsciously hilarious Rebecca Bloomwood Brandon. In I've Got Your Number, Kinsella gives us a brand new heroine, Poppy Wyatt, a physiotherapist who loses her precious vintage engagement ring and then has her equally precious cellphone stolen. Without her phone, she'll never find her ring. When she fortuitously spots a discarded cellphone in the trash, Poppy picks it up. The owner on the other end -- a stranger -- turns out to be just the man to waken her mind to the truth about her fiancé and her heart to a love that matters. Kinsella's heroines are lovable and funny, self-deprecating in the most engaging way. The author's subtle critique of the intellectual and business elite is pointed but neither preachy nor cynical. Her prose is hip and engaging, her humor infectious, her plots zany but just credible enough to maintain the illusion of reality. Even though I rarely use a cellphone and never text, I enjoyed Poppy's incessant use of the device. I read this very funny book in two days. I have yet to learn to text, however.

Non-fiction

* The Harbinger:  The Ancient Mystery that Holds the Secret of America’s Future, Jonathan Cahn.  Cahn is a messianic rabbi.  The author's thesis is that the warning in Isaiah 9:10 given to ancient Israel to turn back to God is the same warning given to this nation by the events of 9/11. The thesis is conveyed in the form of a narrative. The nine harbingers (that is, signs or warnings of judgment to come) prophesied in Isaiah are the breach, the terrorist, the fallen bricks, the tower, the gazit stone, the sycamore, the erez tree, the utterance, and the prophecy. The parallels between God's warnings to ancient Israel and Judah and His warnings to modern America are undeniably striking.

Some critics quarrel with the author's thesis that both Israel and America are countries formed under a covenant with God, but to me that's a quibble. God drew both nations to Himself, and both King Solomon and President George Washington dedicated their nations to God with a warning that His blessings would be removed if the people ever turned away from Him. The destruction of the Twin Towers and the fall of the stock market a few days later was the first shaking for America, involving all nine harbingers. The second shaking came exactly seven years later when the stock market crashed again. Both crashes occurred on a significant date in the Hebrew calendar, which Rabbi Cahn explains in detail. As a Christian and amateur student of the Bible who (alas) does not know Hebrew, I greatly appreciate Rabbi Cahn's reliance on Scripture and his knowledge of ancient history, his explanations of the Hebrew language and calendar, and his investigation of conditions at Ground Zero that were treated as peripheral rather than critical by news pundits and politicians.

I realize some pagans, humanists, rationalists, secularists, atheists, agnostics, and End Times skeptics may think this book isn't for them -- but it is so intriguing on the subjects of history and politics, even they will find it riveting and thought-provoking.

I have also watched the DVD based on this book, entitled The Isaiah 9:10 Judgment: Is There an Ancient Mystery that Foretells America's Future?  Superbly narrated by Rabbi Cahn, the images are compelling and the production excellent. Until I read the book and watched this DVD, I knew next to nothing about the felling of the sycamore tree or the planting of the erez tree near Ground Zero; the quarrying and placement of the gazit stone where the new tower is being erected; the crack in the foundation of Federal Hall caused by the events of 9/11; the place of the country's dedication in 1789 after the inauguration of George Washington as the first president; the religious nature of the dedication ceremony; or the striking repetition of our national leaders' defiant speeches in reaction to 9/11. The parallels between ancient Israel and modern America are uncanny but precise and far too important to ignore, especially the chance we Americans have to heed the warnings and avoid a terrible judgment.

See Amazon for other book and DVD reviews by Johnine.  Also see our web site at www.margaritestjohn.com.