A Minute Before Friday

Jonna Lightfoot MacLaughlin is brave and unsure, confident yet hates her hair, and curious which makes her a great religion reporter. I wish I could have coffee with her in New York and follow her on Twitter. Instead she's in the pages of Jo Kadlecek's third novel in the Lightfoot Trilogy Series, A Minute Before Friday. If you're a fan of NYC Jonna is a great guide. She also gives a peek into the world of reporting. Her probing questions into both story and soul make for a suspenseful read that I lost sleep over. I sat down with A Minute Before Friday for a few chapters and ended up reading to the last page one very enjoyable evening.

Jonna Lightfoot MacLaughlin, religion reporter extraordinaire, has moved up in the world. No longer in Denver, or even New Orleans, she's in the news capital, the capital of the world, New York City. But as Jonna is wont to do, she stirs up all kinds of trouble while searching for the elusive Good News story. The ultimate melting pot is the place to be when searching for religion stories. There is one in every new face on the subway. Covens of Wiccans demanding equal rights for their dead, former gang bangers hanging out at the Chinatown Jesus Center, and an Ivy League school with an expensive secret-everything's a potential story. But in Jonna's quest for truth, truth is the last thing she's getting. This is book three in the Lightfoot trilogy. Having only read the first book in the trilogy, I was a little concerned that I would have missed too great of a chunk of Jonna's life to enjoy jumping in at book three. And though I now want to go back and read two, I didn't find myself frustrated a bit at this non-dependant sequel. This book was a real page turner. Not suspenseful enough to make me lose sleep or get the creeps in front of a window at night, but with enough shady characters, missing people and mystery to keep me reading. My chief complaint is that the chapters are pretty long and never end at a point where it is okay to quit for the night. I yawned all day, I tell ya. But it was worth it. Armchair Interviews says: A good Christian fiction with strong characters and sleep-losing storytelling.

The third in a trilogy, this novel shows Kadlecek has saved the best for last- setting this novel in the Big Apple. A great read for anyone who shares a love for the city or just wants to be swept up in the life of a NYC reporter. -Sarah Tulloch, Editorial Assistant at HCPro, Inc. and former Journalism student of Jo.