Book Review

The other day Michael Bane gave a positive review to Matthew Bracken’s Enemies books, so I thought I’d check out Enemies: Foreign and Domestic. Since Phil doesn’t read fiction, the dirty work falls to me.

Anyway, it’s pretty good. It reminded me a lot of some of the later, VERY fat Tom Clancy novels. (Enemies is also a fat book.) Lots of action, lots of characters, lots of plot. I recommend it if you’re a Second Amendment supporter. For what it is, it’s very well done.

Unfortunately, Enemies shared one of the problems I had with Clancy’s fatter novels — the ones he wrote after he got to be a big enough author that no editor had the balls to actually, you know, edit his galleys. It wasn’t that they were necessarily too long (although a good editor would certainly have trimmed them a bit), but that the lack of editing showed up in a jarring way. The most annoying for me was when I’d catch Clancy repeating himself — having a character repeat the exact same line that either he or another character had thought or uttered, whether ten or three hundred pages before.

That happened in Enemies, too, a couple of times. An early mention of “ATF” as standing for “Agents that Fly” pops up again much later. Towards the end, the character “Silvari” complains to his supervisor twice in twenty pages about being on “the Fed List.”

However, that aside, overall I’m impressed. For a first effort, the quality of the writing is definitely at par with the later Clancy novels. Not near as good as Hunt for Red October; about par with Executive Orders.

It has fun touches, too — the novel is sprinkled throughout with thinly-disguised versions of real-world figures. There’s a throwaway paragraph about the death of a fat anti-gun moviemaker named Norbert Nottingham. Think of a fat anti-gun moviemaker with alliterative initials, and you’ll probably figure out the real-world analogue to Mr. Nottingham. If I knew Virginia politics better, I might be able to figure out some of the political analogues.

Anyway, I recommend the book. The author’s website is here; apparently Enemies is the first in a trilogy.

One interesting note for me personally, having just attended the Bower Clinic, was the heroine’s use of a “Tennyson Champion” .223 single-shot pistol for covert long-range work. It took me only a moment to figure out the real-world analogue to that gun. Disguising the name was a thoughtful touch; I’d hate to see my T/C’s mischaracterized in the MSM as “assassin’s weapons of choice” just because of a mention in a book that’s no doubt going to be very popular with all them eeeevil “right wing militia gun nuts.”

Update: too late, somebody’s actually marketing single-shot pistols for sniping. Oh well.