Once upon a time it was Nanowrimo, and I wrote a story. For now, I'm calling it A Good Man Goes to War. Because ripping off Doctor Who titles is fun.
A Good Man Goes to War is a story about family, death, love, difficult moral choices, and redemption. Four different narrators chronicle a war between Earth’s guardian angels and the critical role two families play in it.
The novel begins when Michael is assigned watch over Marie Gregson, whose relatively safe, uneventful, and unimportant life is an odd assignment for an angel so skilled. Marie is childhood friends with Kelly and Connor, the children of the family friends the O’Donnells. When Kelly dies of leukemia at age twelve, Connor is devastated and enters a depression that continues for years. Kelly persuades Heaven to let her be Connor’s guardian angel.
The O’Donnells and Gregsons are reunited when the O’Donnells move to the Gregsons’ town. Connor and Marie rekindle their friendship, which is complicated by their mutual attraction, Connor’s depression, and Marie’s hallucinations, which she later learns are not hallucinations at all, but guardian angels. As Connor and Marie associate, Michael and Kelly become good friends. When a friend of Connor’s introduces him to a hallucinogenic drug, Connor finds that he can see Kelly, over whom he is still grieving, and quickly descends into addiction. Connor’s addiction breaks the hearts of both the Gregsons and the O’Donnells, and after an explosive fight over Connor’s drug usage, Connor and Marie don’t speak for two years.
Marie remains close to Connor’s younger siblings, Danny and Alice, despite her estrangement with Connor. Michael tells Kelly the rumors he’s heard of impending war among the guardian angels over their power over the humans they guard, unaware that Marie can hear and see both of them. Two years after Marie and Connor stop speaking to each other, Connor nearly kills Alice when he is under the influence of his hallucinogen. This incident leaves Alice in critical condition and shocks Connor into a lifestyle change. He goes to a rehabilitation center. Upon his return, he and Marie awkwardly try to patch up their friendship, which is complicated yet again by the feelings for each other they both have.
The guardian angels war escalates, and Michael and Kelly alternate guarding assignments while the other fights against the angels who kill their humans for attention to their cause. Michael becomes quite attached to Kelly, whose passionate love for her brother he admires.
Connor and Marie become friends again. Connor tells Marie that he saw Kelly whenever he took drugs, and Marie realizes that the drugs enable everyone else to see the angels she always sees. The next morning, Marie’s parents and Michael are shocked to find her and her car missing and a suicide note on her desk. Connor begins to spiral into depression, but Alice and Danny insist that Marie couldn’t have killed herself. Michael, furious with Kelly for letting Marie disappear while he was away, breaks Heaven’s rules and communicates with Connor through his computer and instructs him to look for her.
The angels’ war grows, and both Kelly and Michael have no choice but to leave the O’Donnells and their search for Marie. Connor, Danny, and Alice find Marie imprisoned by guardian angels in a roadside pharmacy, where she is frantically trying to reproduce the drug Connor was addicted to. She tells the O’Donnell siblings about guardian angels, how she can see them, how Kelly was usually with them, and all she overheard about the angels’ war. Alice readily accepts Marie’s tale, but Connor and Danny struggle with it.
Connor is very upset when his siblings volunteer to try using Marie’s recreation of the drug, which she has created in order to slip into the town’s water supply so that all humans can see the guardian angels and thus defend themselves should they attack. Connor grapples with the idea of forcing an entire town to consume the drug that nearly destroyed his life.
Around the world, casualties from the angels’ war rise, though no humans know the cause of the casualties. Michael and Kelly fight both on Earth and in Heaven. Marie perfects the drug the Connor used, and all the O’Donnell siblings decide to take the drug in order to help Marie fight her way out of the pharmacy. Once escaped from the pharmacy, the O’Donnells and Marie slip the drug that they made in the pharmacy into the water towers of all the towns they can reach.
Within a few hours, most people in the town can see the angels, and it is not long before the angels’ war comes to the town. Connor, Marie, and Alice fight the angels while Danny sends a summary of the situation and a recipe for the drug to his entire underground online network so that they can do the same in other towns.
The rebel angels lock their opponents out of the Earth, leaving humans alone to defend themselves from the rebel angels. The battle lasts for five days, but thanks to Marie’s recipe and Danny’s distribution of it, the human race survives long enough for Michael and some of the other best guardian angels to break back into the Earth and defeat the rebel angels.
Connor’s descent into drug addiction, which is broken only by a deep love for his family and lots of time and effort, and subsequent recovery illustrate for both readers and for Marie that people can always change. Through Kelly, Michael learns that great strength rather than weakness can come from love and the importance of family. Connor learns to accept death and that death is not the ultimate end of a soul. All of the characters face difficult choices that have no clear right or wrong answer, and learn that they must sometimes go against all they feel is right in order to prevent even worse evil from prevailing. Each character has their faith tried, and with a little help, comes out triumphant. They learn that at times, even good men must go to war, and when good men go to war for good reasons, demons run.
