Published by Little, Brown and Company on May 16, 2023
A Line in the Sand is a thriller/mystery with war as a backstory, but it is also a story of loss and healing. The plot builds steam until it explodes in a series of action scenes, each more tense than the last. Yet the minor characters, more than the plot, make the story stand out.
Arman Bajalan was an interpreter in Iraq. His family was killed. He earned a visa to relocate to the US, but only after he witnessed a war crime committed by contractors, a nice name for mercenaries. He told a lieutenant who promised him protection. Now Bajalan works as a custodian in a motel, living a life of “ritual with no purpose he could recall.”
Bajalan discovers a man’s body on the beach where he regularly swims before starting his shift at the motel. A tattoo identifies the man’s affiliation with the Australian military. The people who killed the man likely believed he was looking for Bajalan. They wanted to find Bajalan first.
Detective Catherine Wheel and her partner Lamar Adams catch the case of the dead Australian. Since Bajalan is a witness, Wheel spends time learning his story. She soon suspects that he might be in danger. A series of killings over the course of the novel confirms those suspicions.
The contractors belonged to a company called Decision Tree. Trevor Graves, its CEO, is a corrupt power broker who is about to sign a contract with the government that is worth billions to his company. Congress is slow walking an investigation that might jeopardize that contract.
Sally Ewell, a reporter for a Virginia newspaper, is covering the congressional hearing. An anonymous source gives her a thumb drive with a note that invites her to a meeting at a train station. Sally brings her former lover, Carter West III (Trey to his buddies), who is also involved in the Decision Tree hearing as a congressional aide. Wheel, Lamar, and Bajalan are following a lead at the station. They all hook up and, in the course of events, realize the information on the thumb drive might relate to the danger that Bajalan faces. Trey contends that the thumb drive implicates national security.
Characters embark on separate journeys that eventually lead to a resolution. Wheel follows her instincts until her desire to confront Graves meets with serious pushback.
The plot is surprisingly tight, given the number of branches and subplots that Kevin Powers built into the story. Occasional shootouts and knifings add urgency to Wheel’s investigation. Good guys are sometimes difficult to separate from bad guys, but lives of good and bad are equally likely to end in violence. The key plot point, a conspiracy to cover up war crimes, is far from original, but Powers tells a story that never feels like a cliché.
Characterization is well above par for a thriller. Wheel doesn’t posture herself as the only police officer in the world who cares about victims, a tired approach to characterization that ruins too many police thrillers. Wheel’s concern for Bajalan and for people in general comes across as genuine. She digs herself a hole by digging into Graves (no pun intended) and, when she believes her career is down the toilet, she’s faced with the kind of moral issue that is common in thrillers: She can abandon the law she’s always upheld by imposing her own version of justice or she can let the guilty go unpunished. It is to Powers’ credit that he made such a stale idea seem convincing. I was particularly impressed by Wheel’s understanding that vigilantism comes with a price — not just to the vigilante, but to a society that allows individuals to pick and choose the laws they follow.
Supporting characters, including Sally’s father and the motel owner who employs Bajalan, play heroic roles. They are such fundamentally decent people that Powers forces the reader to worry about their fates. One of the most emotionally effective scenes involves two other characters who are collateral to the plot, a teenage hooker and a state trooper who helps her.
Death and the stupidity of war weigh heavily on the minds of characters who lost friends and family because Dick Cheney and his puppet president decided that Saddam had to go, a decision that not coincidentally enriched Cheney’s Halliburton. The politics of war and defense contracting are underplayed in the novel — Powers delivers a thriller, not a lecture — but that background strengthens the plot’s plausibility and enhances the sense of pain that pervades characters whose lives are forever diminished by wars that result from business decisions rather than moral choices.
Powell recognizes that pain is beyond our control. In the end, the novel suggests that we can respond to pain with hatred of those who cause it, a response that withers the soul, or we can choose not to hate. Again, that insight isn’t original, but the need to make that choice comes across as a genuine emotional reaction to painful circumstances. Even if the novel does nothing new, its effective repackaging of familiar elements earns A Line in the Sand a solid recommendation.
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