Courtesy of UL Press
I didn’t particularly want to read A White Hot Plan. It’s a thriller about a white nationalist plot to blow up downtown New Orleans, which is too close to some of my actual fears to provide escapist summer reading, but my stack was low, so I picked it up. And then struggled to put it down. Husband-and-wife writing team Mike and Ayan Rubin dish out an explosion on page three and murders on pages five and seven, and by the time the shrapnel fell through the trees and the victim’s car sank into the swamp, I was ready to clear my calendar for the afternoon.
A White Hot Plan is marketed as a thriller, and it is one—rare for me, I became terribly invested in the safety of a fictional child, and promptly tore through the last fifty pages—but the Rubins have also put together a farce with solid dollops of morality play. Characters frequently reap what they sow, and like as not fall on their behinds (or worse) in pulling the fruits of their labors out of the ground. We’re all allowed a few easy shots calling white nationalists stupid—I’ve taken them myself and will continue to do so—but the Rubins' villains are more deftly drawn, overestimating themselves and underestimating others: not plain slack-jawed incompetence but the more relatable misperception of where the brainpower lies. People who think they’re significantly better informed, or wiser than they actually are, can cause chaos and mayhem at a scale rivaled only by the forces of nature, and if hubris were an active character in this book, she’d have the highest kill count by far.
[Read Chris Turner-Neal's list of book recommendations for 2022, here.]
This novel also stands out for its ability to meet some of its most repugnant characters where they are. Crime thrillers are generally populated by shady people with grubby interior lives, and A White Hot Plan is no exception, but one character, a true believer central to the plan, is chillingly portrayed as a simple idealist. A fundamentally hollow, people-pleasing soul thirsty for praise, Kenny would have been a saint if he’d stumbled into a monastery instead of a nest of white-power terrorists. As it is, this blank slate fills up quickly with swastikas, and the time the reader spends with Kenny is a window into a twisted clarity of mind. He believes the road to salvation is paved with broken Black bodies, but his eyes are raised to the reward he expects. Hannah Arendt made her bones with the banality of evil; now the Rubins see her and raise her evil in pure simplicity. Readers will be used to an evildoer they like—my favorite genre of television is “the countess has poison, and she’s not afraid to use it”—but in Kenny I confronted a wicked man I simply wouldn’t have taken seriously, and it shook me.
The story doesn’t always break new ground—the secretary is sassy, the detective has a traumatic past, the waitress understands—and I don’t think my conscience would have let me name a bad guy “Bubba Mauvais,” but to the extent these are flaws, they’re forgivable. An extra treat is the obvious fun the authors had coming up with Louisiana names: Boulette Babineaux, Petit Rouge Parish, St. Bonaventure Parish, and many more, culminating in a strip club named Good Cheeks. In an extra bit of oh-God verisimilitude, the parish coroner—elected in Petit Rouge Parish instead of chosen for expertise, as in many real-world parishes—is a not-especially-good podiatrist. Here’s wishing A White Hot Plan some white-hot sales.
A White Hot Plan can be found at ulpress.org.
Editor's Note: This is the first of Chris Turner-Neal's new bi-monthly book review column. Look forward to reading more about regionally-focused, authored, or published literature in upcoming issues of Country Roads.
