Hostile Intent by Don Bentley

Published by Berkley on May 3, 2022

After someone tells Matt Drake’s wife to grow a pair, Drake decides to confront him when (as Will Smith learned) he should just let it go. But Drake is a tough guy who loves guns (the insult comes at a gun range while Drake is helping the little woman improve her shooting technique) so he needs to show the world, or at least the reader, that tough guys never bypass an opportunity to be tough. Looking for toxic masculinity? Call Matt Drake.

Drake is a case officer for the DIA. He’s all man, as he proves by telling us how turned on his lovely wife makes him and by making sure the reader knows that he really enjoys shagging her. He tells puny weak men to turn in their “man card” when they fail to meet his standards of masculine behavior. He can’t look at a woman without rating her sex appeal. All standard fare for tough guy heroes, even more so for insecure wannabes who love tough guy novels like this one.

Tough guy heroes spend a lot of time assuring the reader of their competence and overall superiority at all things requiring toughness and even things that don’t. They are apparently too insecure to let readers judge for themselves. Too much of this novel is dedicated to a tough guy’s worship of himself.

Drake works for and with tough guys who have all the Ranger and Delta and Green Beret credentials that make tough guys so darn special. They speak to each other in tough guy dialog to reassure each other that they aren’t secretly pansies. Don Bentley makes sure the readers know exactly what guns they are carrying and what scopes they’ve affixed to their rifles so that gun porn addicts can get their fix.

A good chunk of the novel is spent summarizing earlier novels. The summaries are unnecessary, as Hostile Intent would work as a stand-alone even without the summaries. They seem to have been included to boost the page count in a novel that fails to develop subplots or anything else beyond tough guy rhetoric. Bentley also ups the wordcount with obsessive data dumps. Want to know the horsepower of a V-8 engine in a Range Rover? Or the candlepower of its LED headlights? But what about the high beams? The speed at which a paratrooper’s boots hit the ground? Useless data substitutes for useful characterization. I guess all a reader needs to know about tough guys is that they’re tough. And they love their sexy wives, or at least they love having sex with them.

The plot anticipates a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Be prepared to endure President Zelenskyy being belittled as a coward. Apart from Bentley’s lack of prescience about how the invasion would take place, his belief that Europe would be indifferent to the invasion, and his wild miss on the character of Ukraine’s president (it turns out that in the real world, you don’t need to be a tough guy to be brave), the story has little to do with that war as it focuses on the tired theme of a loose nuke entering the marketplace and creating the threat of World War III. Drake and a team of tough guys are dispatched to recover the nuke, taking on the Russian Army in the process. The plot is just an excuse for Drake and his band of tough guys to be tough in combat, and for some Russian tough guys to be tough (but not as tough as the Americans), and for a Mossad agent to be extra tough because tough guy writers worship Mossad.

Bentley’s writing style is pedestrian when it’s not ridiculously clichéd (“failure wasn’t an option”; “swaying like a drunken sailor”). The novel offers plenty of action to fans of tough guy action novels, but the absence of characterization or an interesting plot makes Hostile Intent a less interesting choice than tough guy novels that offer more substance, better characters, and snappier prose.

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