Merry Christmas!

Vengeance by Rick Campbell

Published by St. Martin's Press on December 16, 2025

Rick Campbell’s Trident Deception novels are in equal measures spy stories, action stories, and submarine warfare stories. This is a pleasant blend of genres I enjoy, but Campbell excels at underwater action. Submarines are the reason I look forward to these novels.

Vengeance begins with an assassin shooting the Secretary of Defense moments after he threatened sanctions against Russia. Video analysis reveals that former Navy SEAL Lonnie Mixell was the shooter. Mixell recently murdered the wife of his former best friend and fellow SEAL, series protagonist Jake Harrison. The protagonist checks all the boxes that action novel authors seem to require, in that he’s named Jake (Jack being an acceptable alternative) and is a former SEAL (any other special forces background being an acceptable alternative).

Jake blames his former girlfriend, CIA Director Christine O’Connor, for his wife’s death and has made himself scarce. O’Connor would normally task Jake and specialized skills officer Khalila Dufour with finding Mixell, but Jake is in the wind and Khalila is in hot water for killing the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations. Christine decides the Agency needs to track down Jake and get him on the case.

In an earlier novel, Brenda Verbeck was forced to resign as Secretary of the Navy after she tried to cover up her brother’s plot to sell centrifuges to Iran. Although she arranged for witnesses against her brother to die and is lucky not to be in prison, she has a bug up her bum about the president’s refusal to stand behind her. Now Verbeck wants Mixell to assassinate the president. Her hairbrained scheme drives much of the story.

The last significant plot element involves the new Russian president and his plan to invade Ukraine. In this fictional version of reality (one in which the US has fought recent naval battles against Russia), the US assesses Russia’s limited objective as capturing a corridor that links Crimea to Russia rather than a wholesale invasion of Ukraine. The US persuades NATO countries to back sanctions against Russia, which Russia intends to counter by sinking oil transports that travel through the Gulf of Hormuz, forcing western nations to buy Russian oil and gas. This gives Campbell a chance to bring back series regular Murray Wilson, captain of the submarine USS Michigan.

Jake’s first mission is to lead a team charged with destroying centrifuges that Iran received from Russia and installed inside a mountain complex. The fictional president is concerned that bunker-buster bombs won’t penetrate with sufficient depth to do the job, creating the need for Jake’s heroics. They must escape the mountain before the timer-activated explosives detonate, promoting typical thriller tension as the heroes encounter obstacles to the successful completion of their mission.

It's a bit disappointing (or at least it was to me) that a submarine doesn’t enter the plot until chapter 30 (of 89). When a Russian sub starts sinking tankers, the US Navy makes an ineffective response. Submarines make no significant return until chapter 47 while the Michigan plays no significant role until chapter 54. The action is furious after that point. I always enjoy scenes involving two submarine captains devising strategies as they try to blow each other out of the water. Submarine warfare dominates the novel’s second half.

Jake has another chance to play hero when Mixell seeks vengeance for the events in an earlier novel that caused the death of Mixell’s lover, events that Mixell blames upon Jake and Christine. As is common in modern thrillers, the plot depends on a number of improbabilities, including Christine’s convenient presence when Mixell tries to orchestrate his assassination plot. I suppose her capture by Mixell as part of his vengeance scheme is an inevitable conclusion to a story arc involving Jake, Christine, and Mixell. Jake’s response is the predictable fare of action thrillers.

Also improbable is Russia’s attack on civilian shipping and its effort to sink an American aircraft carrier. Why doesn’t this act of war spark a direct American (and likely NATO) assault on Russia? I suppose Campbell didn’t want to go there because — although the series is already an alternate history — a departure from the real world of that magnitude would turn it into science fiction. Still, the president’s response is both less vigorous than the circumstances warrant and pleasantly at odds with the current president’s indifference to Ukraine.

The series has made a point of telling the reader that Jake always loved Christine and only married his wife because Christine twice turned down his marriage proposals before he gave up and married someone else. That dynamic is also resolved in this book, although I won’t spoil the outcome for those who can’t guess it. The interplay of Jake and Christine (with a brief glimpse of Jake in bed with Khalila) has grown a bit tedious, so I was glad to see it end. Jake’s decision to shag Khalila is interesting, given that Khalila was thinking about killing him in an earlier book. She’s toned down her psychopathic tendencies, which actually makes her a less interesting character, although she manages to indulge her darker instincts before the story ends.

The political machinations and the soap operatic drama involving Jake and Christine have always been secondary to my enjoyment of the submarine warfare in this series. The former plot elements are about average for a modern thriller and would in themselves warrant a mild recommendation to thriller fans. To fans of submarine stories, however, I give a much stronger recommendation for this novel and the series as a whole.

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Dead Ringer by Chris Hauty

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on December 2, 2025

Celebrated authors like Don DeLillo and Stephen King have used John F. Kennedy’s assassination as the springboard for fascinating plots. Less celebrated writers have done the same with varying results. Chris Hauty joins the crowd with a story that imagines a conspiracy involving a shadowy Catholic organization that oversaw many of the world’s most significant assassinations, including JFK, RFK, and MLK.

Hauty’s conspirators are concerned that America is tilting toward progressive policies that failed to challenge godless communists. In defiance of history and the US Constitution, the conspirators embrace the popular but mistaken notion that America’s founders meant for the US to be a Christian nation. The First Amendment demonstrates the fallacy of their belief, as does the constitutional prohibition against establishing a religious test for public office, but the conspirators in Dead Ringer want to destroy the Constitution by turning the US into a Catholic theocracy.

Hauty’s protagonist is Joe Mingus. Hauty’s Joe works as a bouncer at a strip club in Baltimore (not to be confused with David Gordon’s Joe the Bouncer, who works at a strip club in Queens). While Joe the Bouncer is a former Special Forces operative, Joe Mingus is a former Secret Service agent who was charged with protecting the president. Mingus made an error of judgment as he tried to protect a fellow agent from a sex scandal. He lost his job and earned a felony conviction that prevents him from carrying a firearm.

The story begins with Olivia Heller, an information specialist with the National Archives. Olivia stumbled upon evidence that Alex Tarasenko’s report on President Kennedy’s assassination is not just an urban legend. Olivia chooses to die early in the novel rather than revealing her evidence to killers employed by a “secret organization of orthodox, ultraconservative Catholics in the US, intent on bringing about what they have designated the ‘Next America’.” The organization is known as the Movement.

Before she died, Heller sent history professor and Jesuit brother Juan Verdugo a video message that sends Verdugo on a quest to recover the Tarasenko dossier. For reasons that can only be explained as plot drivers (if the events didn’t happen, there would be no plot), Tarasenko encrypted a series of clues, leading Verdugo on a treasure hunt to find the hidden materials.

Olivia was shagging Tarasenko back in the day, but a year before her death, she was shagging Mingus. When Mingus learned of Olivia’s death, he assumed she was murdered. In search of vengeance, he goes to Olivia’s townhouse, hoping to find information that will lead him to her killer. There he discovers Verdugo, who — in response to a text message Olivia sent minutes before her death — is retrieving a book he loaned to Olivia. Mingus soon receives a text that Olivia had arranged to be sent after her death. The text asks him to protect Verdugo.

The quest begins in Washington D.C., where Mingus and Verdugo must steal an old cipher machine that Tarasenko used in the 1960s to encrypt his clues. The plot sends Mingus and Verdugo to Dallas, New Orleans, and Mexico City as they solve riddles that lead them to the next clue The novel’s final chapters provide a barely plausible explanation for the treasure hunt, so I’m not going to trash Hauty for structuring the story around it, despite my inability to buy into the plot.

I think it was Chekov who said that if an action hero gives a shooting lesson to a priest in act one, the priest will shoot someone in act three. Enough said about that.

I credit Hauty for his painstaking research. The novel is soaked in details about the Kennedy assassination and the conspiracy theories to which it gave birth. That lore, real or imagined, is at least as interesting as Mingus’ attempt to find the truth.

The final reveal is so far over the top that I also give Hauty credit for having the audacity to go there. I don’t know the true facts surrounding the Kennedy assassination, but Hauty’s version won’t pass anyone’s plausibility test, notwithstanding his ability to weave the threads of history into a new design. Does that matter? The more a story entertains me, the less concerned I am about plausibility. The balance in Dead Ringer weighs more on the entertainment side of the scale.

The aftermath of the reveal imagines a better America — a path forward, toward democracy and away from those who try to subvert it. Nice to imagine — and I can’t fault a happy ending — but the aftermath might be even less plausible than the reveal. The movement that Mingus works to overcome doesn’t compare to the movement that, for the moment, holds the nation in a death grip.

Mingus doesn’t have much personality but he has enough to serve the ends of the story. Verdugo is true to his Jesuit calling. The bad guys are typical masters of the universe, apart from a religiously motivated assassin who gives religion a bad name. The assassin overcomes a surprising number of wounds but keeps on killing. While he is yet another implausible element in the novel, the story delivers sufficient action to please thriller fans and is sufficiently nutty to engage the attention on conspiracy theorists.

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Slow Gods by Claire North

Published by Orbit on November 18, 2025

The protagonist of Slow Gods is Mawukana na-Vdnaze (known to friends as Maw). He is from Heom, a city on the planet Tu-mdo organized by the Antekeda Venture, a member of the United Social Venture. The Venture colonized “the worlds that would become the Shine.” Maw is of the Mdo, “the peoples who are the Shine.” They are governed by the Executorium, a body that is led by the Executor, who rules with an iron fist. The Accord, an organization of planets outside of Shine space, is deterred from war against the Shine by rumors of Shine blackships, lurking silently at undisclosed locations in space, each capable of destroying a planet.

Most worlds in Slow Gods (at least those important to the story) are inhabited by humans and sentient mechanized beings known as quans that serve their mainframes. Rencki, a quan tasked with guarding Maw, takes the form of a fox with three tails. In addition to acting as security for Maw, quans try to keep him “regulated,” preventing him from losing his grip and going to a dark place.

Nonhuman aliens exist but, with one exception, are unimportant to the story. Maw shares factoids about them from time to time (“The kekekee of B48TCLM1 are born in the clouds and live their entire lives without touching the ground.”) and ponders their varying languages. The offhand explanations of alien cultures are likely meant as worldbuilding, but many of Maw’s observations add to the page count without contributing worthwhile context or atmosphere to the story.

The alien race of significance to the plot is the Slow, having been so named by quans. An ancient race, the Slow doesn’t disclose anything about itself, but it has sent emissaries in the form of impenetrable black spheres and cubes to various worlds in a system that includes Shine planets, warning residents that binary stars in a nearby neighborhood will collide in a hundred years, wiping out life on a number of their populated planets.

We still haven’t arrived at a plot, but bear with me. The Shine practices a totalitarian version of capitalism. Most people are born into debt (they are assessed with something like a tax at birth) and spend their lives working to pay it off. Most cannot afford to pay for an education, so they reduce their debt through manual labor. Like all authoritarians, the Shine do not value education for the masses because “education breeds curiosity. And curiosity is one of the very first qualities that the leaders of the Shine seek to eliminate from the population.”

Nor does the Shine want its people to know that their planets are about to die because autocrats cannot abide any suggestion that the lives they offer their people are less than perfect. We see this whenever autocratic governments deny the existence of any problem (such as climate change) that, if acknowledged, might disturb the serenity of the governed. The term “Shine” also refers to “status, prestige, privilege, charisma, the ability to get people to do things for you,” qualities primarily enjoyed by the few who are not in debt. Parallels to current events give currency to the alien political system that Claire North imagines.

Also in the background is Maw’s backstory. Maw died a rather horrible death. Other horrible deaths followed. The current version of Maw resembles the original but, when he loses control, bad things happen. He begins the novel by telling the reader that he is “a very poor copy of myself.”

How is this possible? Maw is a pilot. Navigating through arcspace requires an organic brain melded with electronic systems. To keep Shine pilots from going mad, “it is standard practice to irradiate parts of a Pilot’s brain, reducing them to a mere organic husk through which navigational protocols may pass.” Maw was sent into space without that mind-destroying treatment. At the journey’s end, everyone on his ship had died a horrible death, including Maw, whose original body was covered in blood. His new body is apparently immortal, although it may take some time to reconstitute after it is destroyed. And he will only come back to life if his body is unobserved — for reasons that are never satisfactorily explained, if other people are thinking about him and are certain he is dead, his return to life is slowed.

So we still haven’t arrived at a plot, which gives you a sense of how the novel proceeds. Slow Gods is bloated by backstories and worldbuilding, all in support of a plot that seems secondary to its context. Much of the worldbuilding is interesting, but much of it could have been omitted without harming the novel.

So finally (and thank you for your patience), let's talk about the plot. Maw takes a job as a pilot who helps transport artifacts from Adjumir, a world that will soon be destroyed by the exploding stars. Other pilots of larger vessels are evacuating people, but an historian named Gebre Nethyu Chatithimska Bajwahra wants to preserve Adjumir culture. Gebre didn’t win a lottery ticket to be evacuated, so she wants to have a fling with Maw, giving North an opportunity to explore cultural attitudes about casual sex. Like me, she's all for it.

Some years after Adjumir is destroyed, an ambassador from the Consensus (humans who have voluntarily joined a hivemind) retains Maw’s services. While hiveminds are not new to science fiction, they are typically portrayed in a negative light (the Borg from Star Trek being a prime example). North uses the Consensus to suggest that people who sacrifice individual identity for a shared consciousness are better equipped to resist tyranny and pursue humane goals. With the help of the Consensus and some quans, and a bit of not-quite-help from the Slow, the plot follows Maw as he takes on the Executor’s embrace of tyranny as the Shine's primary form of governance.

People who complain about unconventional pronouns (and they constitute a very vocal minority of sf fans) might be dumbfounded by the various permutations of he and his that appear in Slow Gods, but people who can’t handle the unconventional have no business reading science fiction. Even sentient robots (for lack of a better term) have their own pronouns. Some pronouns have accent marks. I give North credit for keeping it all straight. The pronouns serve a larger message that may be the story’s purpose: all humans are fundamentally the same despite their individual differences, and all enjoy the same fundamental right to be alive and, in their lives, to be treated with dignity as they define their own identities.

Some of the story seems like padding, although that uncharitable assessment may reflect my lack of interest in, for example, a review of each lover that Gebre had before Maw (apparently to explain Gebre’s greater interest in commitment-free sex than in love) or a list of “types of love that are cruel” or the meaning of various status-determining scars in Shine culture or a description of each statute in an exhibit hall. Worldbuilding is essential in science fiction that takes place on other worlds, but background details can overtake the story. Building the world in the middle of action scenes is annoying. Characters also have an irksome tendency to speechify during chase scenes.

Granted, some of the wordiness is meant to make the story more powerful. Maw feels a connection with a self-sacrificing character who dies when her planet is enveloped by radiation, but that scene conveys sufficient power without repeated reminders that Maw feels guilty or empty because he can’t save her. I appreciated the victim’s insistence that Maw save himself to continue his mission, but the chapter would have been stronger if it had been reduced to those elements without needless plumbing of Maw’s internal depths.

Still, the story explores interesting topics of relevance to readers, including authoritarian governance, the division and manipulation of social classes to serve the ends of powerful rulers, and the contempt with which the powerful regard the ordinary. “How strange it is to live a life where you do no harm, achieve no conquests, and die without a monument.” North makes insightful observations about the tendency to “assume that one person’s emotional landscape is less valid than their own” — the attitude that others should not disturb us with their suffering.

Near the novel’s end, we learn that the Slow have a philosophy of life that is surprisingly human-emotion-centric (given that the Slow are not human) and remarkably banal. The Slow explain this philosophy over several ALL CAP paragraphs that amount to (spoiler alert) “love thy neighbor as thyself.” A nice message, but the Slow travel at sub-light speeds across the universe and that’s all they’ve got to say?

I give North credit. Her prose is lovely; there’s just too much of it. The profundity of her ideas is diluted by the number of ideas she packs into the novel. The ending drags, as if North couldn’t bring herself to finish the story. But these flaws and the others I have highlighted are less significant than the novel’s overall worth as a contribution to the literature of authoritarian governance.

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Happy Thanksgiving!