The Terminal List by Jack Carr

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on March 6, 2018

If you’re a fan of gun porn, where shootings of human beings are described with religious reverence and guns, scopes, and ammunition are treated as sacred objects, you might like The Terminal List. Of course, you’ll have to endure the protagonist’s complaints about California’s “crazy gun laws” that restrict your right to drive around with a box of weapons in the back of your pickup truck. The protagonist is so devoted to his guns that he hates walking around the Naval Special Warfare Command without one and has convinced himself that “the enemy” will attack the naval base because personnel aren’t allowed to carry handguns when they visit their superiors. Paranoid much?

James Reece has a bug up his bum. When he was still a Lieutenant Commander and Navy SEAL, his team was ambushed in Afghanistan, giving Jack Carr a chance to write a clichéd “my war buddy died in my arms” scene. After the mission goes tits up, he’s investigated for subversive activities, including an email he wrote that advocated an illegal assassination scheme. To Reece, thinking outside the box is a sign of good soldiering, even if that means thinking about illegal assassination schemes, but the Secretary of Defense has ordered a cover-up of the ambush and can’t have Reece being treated as a hero. Plus, Reece has a brain tumor, as did two of his men, a coincidence that can’t really be a coincidence. Another of his men committed suicide, but Reece believes he was murdered because the guy would have used his favorite gun if he wanted to off himself. All of this sets up a truly bizarre conspiracy plot that wouldn’t be credible even if it made sense.

Carr sets Reece up as a devoted husband and father with an adoring wife and a young daughter who worships him. Of course, the police find his family dead just as he arrives home from war. They were murdered by four guys with machineguns because that’s supposed to make the murders look like a gang killing. Seriously? Because gangbangers invade houses in nice neighborhoods and kill everyone inside with machineguns? In what fantasy world would the police believe that? The real intent was to kill Reece, but he wasn’t home and the hired killers were apparently too stupid to notice his absence before launching their killing spree.

No longer in the military, Reece is after revenge. I just read in a better novel that “revenge is the core of evil.” Reece has not reached that level of evolution. He believes he was spared so that he can carry out the divine purpose of killing people. Nor is Reece as introspective as Mack Bolan of the Executioner series that started the “highly trained soldier commences a personal war of vengeance after his family is killed” genre. Reece doesn’t think about much of anything that doesn’t involve his beloved guns.

Killing and torture seem to be Reece’s only skills, and while he’s insufferably proud of his superiority to other males, his one-dimensional alpha nature makes Reece a dull boy. But he loves his mama, so I guess readers are supposed to love Reece. The guy is so full of himself that he’s difficult to stomach, and his simple-minded view of the world does not make him an appealing character. Nor does his willingness to kill innocent women (Mexican hookers, of course) if they might wake up and “compromise his mission,” which at that point involves murdering a home’s occupants. Reece’s attempt to position himself as a protector of American values is repugnant. Psychopathic vigilante killers are far removed from American values.

Carr leaves most of his political commentary to secondary characters, like a reporter who was harassed by the government because she “exposed” Benghazi and his spy friend who thinks Snowden did “incalculable damage” to national security by leaking secrets (even the NSA doesn’t believe that), although Reece does manage to condemn the “liberal political leanings” of an Admiral who only holds his position because of a “far-left Democratic president.” Has the U.S. ever had one of those? The words “Deep State” don’t appear in the novel, but they lurk just beneath the surface.

Radicalized American Muslims are among the novel’s cartoon villains (one of them, of course, is a cab driver, because no stereotypes is left unwritten in The Terminal List). Other villains include “bad hombres from Mexico” who live in a Tijuana “shithole.” They aren’t necessary to the plot, but they’re red meat for Carr’s target audience.

Carr’s prose isn’t the worst I’ve encountered, but his dialog is stilted and his style is uninspired: “It was time for Reece to do what he did best. It was time to start killing.”  Carr reserves his most eloquent writing to describe the hand-loaded ammunition that Reece’s father gave him as a birthday present. If there is anything at all to like about The Terminal List, I couldn’t find it, although people who have never read a thriller before might appreciate the glossary at the end.

Atria has published some wonderful books, but they really scraped the bottom for this one. Still, Guns & Ammo and the Washington Times gave it good reviews, so I guess there's a market for simple-minded gun porn.

NOT RECOMMENDED