Chasing the Lion by A.J. Tata

Published by St. Martin's Press on June 1, 2021

There are so many things to dislike about Chasing the Lion, it’s hard to know where to start. The protagonist, the plot, and the prose are unworthy of a reader’s time.

The protagonist is Garrett Sinclair, a lieutenant general in the Army. Sinclair is completely full of himself. He takes every opportunity to tell the reader just how special he is. He is “a leader of combat warriors,” worshipped by the team he leads. He has “wrestled al Qaeda terrorists in knife fights.” There is no person in the world who is better equipped to understand the novel’s evil Iranian villain than Sinclair. There is “no one better” at fighting bad guys. An antagonist might be half his age, but Sinclair is “twice as quick.” Even if a villain “removed his mind, his body would still be a killing machie, and if [the villain] removed his arms, his mind would be a killing machine.” Sinclair is proud of the “selfless sacrifice it took to serve the nation and not himself.” Sinclair claims his maxim is “We do our job and don’t brag or bitch” before spending an entire novel bragging and bitching.

Sinclair is special not only because of his mental and physical superiority, but because (he tells us) he has a high moral standard. The standard is, to put it nicely, flexible. He condemns Iranians for torturing people before he uses torture to get the information he wants. He declares that’s he’s not a murderer but engages in two unnecessary revenge murders. Sinclair is a hypocrite who is blind to his own hypocrisy. I guess that’s the one aspect of his character that’s realistic, but it doesn’t make him easy to tolerate.

Sinclair also tells us that he’s a true American patriot who loves his children. Frankly, if you’re a father, you’re supposed to love your children. You don’t get extra credit for reminding the reader every now and then how much you love them, particularly when you devoted your life to not seeing them very often. (Thank God he had a patriotic wife who stayed home and raised them for him.) We are probably supposed to believe that his children love him, but the only child who makes an actual appearance (as a hostage) doesn’t even rate a speaking part. He’s a prop, not a character. A.J. Tata doesn’t try to develop the kid’s personality because the kid exists only so that Sinclair can save him while telling us what a great dad he is.

Thanks to his position in Joint Special Operations Command, Sinclair knows the president-elect and everyone else who important because a certain kind of thriller hero is expected to hang out with important people as a signal that the hero is also important. Not content with being a military policy maker, however, Sinclair is an action hero, leading his little group of followers on dangerous missions around the world because that’s what aging lieutenant generals do. Well, not really, but that’s what Sinclair does. I didn’t believe for a second that an older guy of his rank would be getting into all the fistfights, knife fights, and gun fights that are meant as a substitute for a plot.

What passes for a plot is based on evil Iranians who have developed some kind of ill-defined “mind control” gas that — I’m not joking here — makes people look at their cellphone screens, as if everyone doesn’t do that already. How exactly minds are controlled by the gas or the cellphones or what the controlled people are supposed to do is never explained. Sinclair at one point is going to kill the president because of “mind control” but we’re never told how he was instructed to do that. Of course, Sinclair has the world’s most powerful mind, so hearing his dead wife telling him to be a good boy is all it takes to overcome the nefarious mind control device. Still, Sinclair knows all about mind control because that’s what “stay at home” orders were. Yeah, public health edicts to prevent a contagion from spreading during a pandemic are mind control. Give me a break.

Perhaps sensing that the whole mind control scheme is too silly to credit, Tata has an evil Iranian mix some sarin gas with the mind control gas and sends a bunch of drones to release the gasses at the presidential inauguration. So wait, is the plan to control minds or to hope that the sarin gas (which actually dissipates pretty quickly in open air) will kill a bunch of people? The plot is too muddled to deliver a clear answer. And if that’s not sufficiently nonsensical, evil Iran has just discovered that it has huge oil deposits, so it intends to use cruise missiles to take out American oil refineries, making America dependent on Iranian oil. As if American would do anything other than invade Iran and take its oil if it did anything like that. Are we supposed to believe the ayatollah doesn’t know that? The notion that Iran is sending submarines with cruise missiles to attack the US is preposterous.

Some neocon Americans are in on the scheme (which they assume is only a small attack at the inauguration) because they want to provoke a war with Iran. I didn’t buy that, either. It’s one thing for neocons to pretend that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction as a pretense for invading Iraq and quite another to aid and abet an enemy attack on American soil. Maybe if Tata were a better writer, he would have sold me on the conspiracy, but the plot comes across as the lunatic raving of someone who suffers from paranoid delusions.

Sinclair grinds multiple axes as the story tears through through the thin plot. Sinclair tells us that the intelligence community and the CIA have repeatedly betrayed America without explaining which mistakes he regards as betrayals. He often expresses his disdain for neocons (presumably meaning Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld), a common theme on Fox News, a network that worshipped Cheney and Rumsfeld before the new cons replaced the neocons. Sinclair doesn’t flesh out those complaints either, making it difficult to understand what Sinclair actually believes. He comes across as an angry man whose anger is ill-defined. Sadly, there are a lot of those in the country. They might be the novel's target audience.

On a smaller scale, the plot imagines that the conspiracy [spoiler alert] victimizes Sinclair’s wife (whose death may not have occurred in the way it was explained to Sinclair) [end spoiler alert]. That’s only possible because the whole world revolves around Sinclair, who is just so important that naturally his wife has to be drawn into the conspiracy. A collateral benefit of that plot twist is Sinclair’s ability to tell us what a wonderful guy he is because he loved his wife. (They met at church, of course, because where else would they have met?) I guess that loving his perfect God-and-America-loving wife makes Sinclair special, as does loving his kids.

Tata’s prose is functional but too often overwrought. Sinclair embarks on a “complex and daring raid” that is part of “the most sensitive, important op in our lifetime, perhaps since World War II.” Sinclair saves the nation from “unspeakable attacks.” The villain is “an Iranian madman” who plans to execute a “sweeping plan that would force America to a tipping point of economic and psychological collapse.” (The absence of any acknowledgement that a good Iranian might exist suggests that Sinclair doesn’t believe in that possibility.) Unfortunately, all of this self-aggrandizing, Iran-hating prose doesn’t create even the slightest bit of dramatic tension. The plot is silly, the protagonist and the villain are both cartoons, and the insinuation of ill-developed politics into the plot prevent Chasing the Lion from working even on the minimal level of a mindless action novel.

NOT RECOMMENDED