Domestic Enemies – Kent Wyatt

Domestic Enemies by Kent Wyatt
Published by Winged Publications on December 10, 2021
Genres: Fiction, Christian
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half-star

Little seeds we sow, and someday they will grow. What if the ill weeds our society wades in today were being planted decades earlier? What if someone had a chance to uproot them?
In 1988, an American warship accidentally shoots down an Iranian civilian jetliner. In 2014, whole families are being murdered in middle class neighborhoods in Colorado Springs. Everyone is looking to Lieutenant Darrell Jacobs, one of the only amputees able to return to police work with a mechanical hook, to find the murderer before he kills again.
Bioelectronic genius Callie Williams has followed Darrell’s inspirational story and decided he is a gift from God to test her high-tech prosthetic arm. But Darrell, with scars both inside and out, is not the Godly man she believes or remembers him to be. He also comes with enemies—the face that lurks in the lost parts of Darrell’s memory and the God Darrell can’t forgive. They both want to finish what they started.
Facing clashing elements of faith and yearning, Darrell and Callie must battle a social engineering expert with an agenda that takes homeland security to a whole new battlefield and will leave you with the uneasy realization that locking your doors will be useless.
HEA, stand alone, with no cliffhanger.

This is going to be a weird review, because I want to talk about the implications of Domestic Enemies more than I do the actual plot. Why? Because the actual plot isn’t that noteworthy. It’s a spec-fic about a guy with a bionic arm chasing Islamic terrorists. Kent Wyatt’s writing is amateurish, but serviceable. It’s a mediocre, forgettable novel. But then there’s the twist at the end: an almost literal Kumbaya moment as Black and white people come together to stop terrorism. God Bless America.

We did all this by getting together as a Christian family, blacks helping whites and whites helping blacks. Nobody was worrying about who did what in the past.

Wyatt places the whole book in the context of this resolution. This is why he wrote the book. This is the theme. Black people should stop complaining about injustice and worrying about the past! One could point out that it isn’t just the past that Black people are worried about—it’s the present, as well. But Wyatt also addresses that earlier in the book through one of the characters:

“I know you’re scared for Antonne, but all the cops I know are good people. They wouldn’t hurt him unless they were scared themselves.”

            “Well, there’s bad ones. Look at what happened back east. Those boys got shot and the riots and all. Those cops shot those black boys for no reason.”

            The statements troubled Callie, but she kept a kind expression, “I wasn’t there and I try not to get caught up in the media hype. That stuff is really all about what sells. I know one thing, there’s bad black people, too.”

So, yeah. Cops are good people, but don’t scare them because they’ll murder you. And don’t forget there are bad black people. No worries, though, when faced with a common enemy like Muslims, we’ll all come together to save America.

Domestic Enemies takes a hard right turn from mediocre spec-fic to full-on Christian nationalist propaganda. If you think Donald Trump is still the legitimate president, this a five-star read. But otherwise, its banal plot, clunky dialogue, and nationalistic moralism are just too much to endure.

half-star