On the day after CIA Director John Brennan told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” that the Islamic State is using chemical weapons in Syria and Iraq, a novel about ISIS using chemical weapons against its enemies in the Middle East has hit #1 on a national best-seller list.

I’m pleased to report that The First Hostage has just become the nation’s #1 best-selling novel in the North American Christian book market, according to the Evangelical Christian Publishing Association. It is also the #7 of all Christian best-sellers, both fiction and non-fiction, this month.

In January, The First Hostage spent four weeks on the Publishers Weekly hardcover fiction best-sellers list. It also hit the USA Today list, though it did not hit the New York Times list.

This is the second in a series of thrillers about J.B. Collins, a fictional foreign correspondent tracking the threat posed by ISIS to the U.S., Israel, Jordan, and a group of other Mideast countries. The previous novel, The Third Target, was released in January 2015.

They are both the first — and, thus far, the only — novels in the world about the threat of the Islamic State.

On behalf of my wife and me — and the entire Tyndale House Publishing team — please let me say thank you so much for your enthusiastic support of this thriller, and The Third Target before it, which hit all the general market lists when it released last year and was also a #1 best-seller in the Christian market. We deeply appreciate how so many of you are blogging and Tweeting and writing on Facebook about both novels, and writing so many positive reviews on Amazon, B&N, Goodreads, and other book sites.

Since many of you keep asking, please rest assured that I am hard at work right now on the third novel in this J.B. Collins series. We expect this next one to release in January 2017 and I’ll certainly keep you posted on my progress along the way.

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• Order The First Hostage today — a new political thriller (four weeks on the Publishers Weekly best-seller list) about ISIS plotting a chemical weapons attack against Israel, Jordan and the United States — it’s now available in hardcover, e-book and audio formats.
• FACT SHEET: The Iranian leadership’s Apocalyptic Beliefs
• FACT SHEET: The Islamic State’s Apocalyptic Beliefs
• What the next US president will need to know about Iran and Islamic State. (my column in The Jerusalem Post)
• What’s the difference between Apocalyptic Islamic eschatology & Biblical eschatology? And why does it matter? (Video & sermon notes)

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• Order THE THIRD TARGET today , the first in this new series — now out in paperback — the New York Times best-selling novel about ISIS capturing chemical weapons in Syria and plotting genocidal attacks.
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