Where Did Everybody Go?

Excellent read! Fast-paced, engaging, and full of suspense. Thomas L. Madden keeps you hooked from beginning to end. Highly recommend and can't wait for the next book in the series! Excellent read! Fast-paced, engaging, and full of suspense. Thomas L. Madden keeps you hooked from beginning to end. Highly recommend and can't wait for the next book in the series!

I picked up Where Did Everybody Go on a whim and ended up reading it in two sittings. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know.

The opening scene grabbed me immediately. Ray Ferrari is just sitting in the park having lunch when the world around him suddenly unravels, car crashes, screaming, people vanishing into thin air. The author drops you right into the chaos without warning and the confusion Ray feels is completely infectious. You are just as disoriented as he is and you desperately want answers.

What I loved most about this book is how it balances so many different elements without ever feeling cluttered. You have a corporate thriller with real stakes, product sabotage, intellectual property theft, an attempted murder, all wrapped inside one of the most fascinating and ambitious projects imaginable, building the Third Temple in Jerusalem. Then layered over all of that is this deeply personal spiritual journey for Ray, a lifelong atheist who starts experiencing coincidences so improbable that even his rational mind cannot dismiss them.

Ray is exactly the kind of protagonist I root for. He is smart, skeptical and honest about his unbelief. He never suddenly converts out of convenience. He wrestles with every question the way a real thinking person would, which makes his journey feel earned rather than forced.

The biblical and historical context woven throughout the story is fascinating without ever slowing the pace down. I learned things I genuinely did not know and found myself looking things up after finishing chapters, which is always the sign of a book that is doing something right.

The United Nations subplot adds another layer of intrigue that left me with my jaw slightly open by the end. I will not say more than that but the stage being set for book two is incredibly compelling.