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A Novel
by Alan Drew
Book Reviewed by:An idyllic California town. A deadly secret. A race against killers hidden in plain sight...
Rancho Santa Elena in 1987 seems like the ideal Southern California paradise—that is, until a series of strange crimes threatens to unravel the town's social fabric: workers attacked with mysterious weapons; a wealthy real estate developer found dead in the pool of his beach house. The only clues are poison and red threads found at both crime scenes. As Detective Benjamin Wade and forensic expert Natasha Betencourt struggle to connect the incidents, they begin to wonder: Why Santa Elena? And why now?
Soon Ben zeroes in on a vicious gang of youths involved in the town's burgeoning white power movement. As he and Natasha uncover the truth about Santa Elena's unsavory underbelly, Ben discovers that the group is linked to a much wider terror network, one that's using a new technology called the internet to spread its ideology, plan attacks, and lure young men into doing its bidding. Ben closes in on identifying the gang's latest target, hoping that the young recruit will lead him to the mastermind of the growing network. But as he digs deeper in an ever-widening investigation, Ben is forced to confront uncomfortable truths about himself and his beloved community, where corruption is ignored and prejudice is wielded against fellow citizens without fear of reprisal.
Chilling and timely, The Recruit follows one man's descent into the darkness lurking just beneath the respectable veneer of modern life.
Setting The Recruit 25 years ago lends an eerie sense of prophecy to the story, as the brutish faces of white supremacist movements are an all-too-familiar feature of today's current events. The Recruit is a nail-biter in the classic sense of the thriller, offering taut prose, compelling and diverse characters, and pitch-perfect pacing that delivers an explosive ending reminiscent of real-life events. Despite the unpleasant subject matter, Drew underscores the fact that good people still outnumber the bad ones — and that hope is an ever-replenishing gift we all should hold onto…for dear life, if necessary...continued
Full Review
(885 words)
(Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski).
After the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to North Vietnamese military forces in April 1975, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese escaped to American ships off the coast, either by boat or helicopter. In Alan Drew's The Recruit, the character Bao Phan is one of these refugees. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates that over two million people left Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 20 years after the fall of Saigon, and by 1992, more than a million had been admitted to the U.S.
One of the points of arrival for refugees was the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station near Irvine, California. In the late 1970s, El Toro received tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the war-torn region. After their first steps on American ...
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Graham Moore, author of The Holdout
The Recruit is thoughtful, relevant, and brainy. Alan Drew paints such a vivid portrait of a seedy world, you're convinced you'd never want to visit it. Yet as the story tightens its grip, you soon realize you can't bear to leave.
