This novel left me rather speechless, although, as you'll see, I'm getting over it. More an uninterrupted stream of right-wing propaganda than a novel, THE GRANITE RIDGE INITIATIVE ends with the nuclear annihilation of Mecca and Medina and considers that a happy ending.

Someone recently said that there are two kinds of people-- those who would like to be good, and those who would like to be strong. Karl Vincent is clearly one of the latter, and his advocacy of the iron fist is unflinching. He makes clear his contempt for the former sort of person in no uncertain terms, and a grainy black and white photograph of his squinting visage clamped around a large cigar on the back inside flap of the book fills in the rest.

The book is a fun read, though. Like many of today's popular thrillers, THE GRANITE RIDGE INITIATIVE is populated with walking cliches. I watched these walking cliches do their deadly business with a sort of shock and awe as Vincent fearlessly revealed his complete contempt for lily-livered humanists. 

This is one of those books that's so bad, it's good.  I do sincerely appreciate the fact that Vincent killed his loathsome protagonist halfway through the book.  It's a good way to understand the mindset of manly men like Donald Rumsfeld and Rush Limbaugh, whose fear of the Other is so crippling that they retreat into stiff-necked machismo, rattling their weaponry against the threat-- the threat that one suspects is more a projection of their own shadows than a real external menace.

I imagine that this is the sort of literature that was popular in Germany about the time Hindenberg was elected Chancellor. This isn't quite as bad as the torture porn of Vince Flynn or Brad Thor-- but it's bad in a different way. I doubt that the cigar chomping author, his mercenary freinds, and their terrorist tactics are really the answer to the disquiet that results as a side effect of imperial policies, and I suspect that in confidence they would agree that the only real solution to restless natives is a Final Solution.

Your humble reviewer is really quite shocked that this book, with its amazingly bad writing and pages and pages of pure facist drivel, was even published. While there's a common misconception that publishing is market-driven, your reviewer believes that this book's publication was subsidized by someone with an agenda.