Holton's Keith Hoar draws on experience for first novel

In writing his first novel, Holton resident Keith Hoar says he stuck to the time-honored rule of authorship: “Write what you know.”

Hoar drew on his experiences in the U.S. Navy and as a designer and builder of computer software systems for several Fortune 100 companies to craft the political thriller “Edge Of Madness,” his first, self-published political thriller that has drawn some comparisons to the work of Tom Clancy.

“It was an idea I’ve had in my head for a long time,” said Hoar, a Brown County native who spent 10 years in the Navy. “This is one of those things I started and wrote half of it, and it sat there for years and got put aside. Finally, after I retired, I said, ‘I’m going to finish that.’ So I wrote the last 300 words in probably three months.”

It’s not the only book that Hoar will have to his credit, however. He’s also put together “The Threat Of Revisionist History On America’s Christian Heritage,” a non-fiction work that had its origins as a thesis work that was part of Hoar’s journey to a master’s degree from Louisiana Baptist Theological Seminary.

A native of the Brown County community of Willis, where his father ran a grain elevator, Hoar spent a year at Kansas State University, “playing around” and not sure of what he wanted to do with his life after high school.

“My grades weren’t all that great,” he said. “I was smarting off.”

But after getting married, Hoar decided that he needed “some kind of a career” to support his family, and he joined the Navy, where he trained as an electronics technician and taught periscope approach tactics to submarine tracking crews.

“It provided me with a good career, but I moved more over to the business side in computers and business intelligence reporting,” he said.

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