Stuck sound effects They probably tracked me through my internet service provider I Should have used Atlas VPN You've probably heard of VPNs before in short There are tool that allows you to surf the web as though you're in a different location by accessing a different server You're granted a new IP and DNS address if you don't know what that means Just pretend that using a VPN causes fairies to cast a spell on your computer that makes people think you're somewhere else If you want to stream a movie or download a game that's unavailable in your area Just use Atlas VPN to pretend that you're in another country and voila Want to watch Rick and Morty or Cowboy bebop on Netflix, but you live in the US just pretend to be Canadian and go nuts It also works with streaming services like Disney Plus Hulu Amazon Prime and HBO Not just that it prevents your government or internet service provider from tracking where you go and what you do Atlas VPN is available on Windows Android iOS and Mac So no matter what device you use you can browse the internet safely and anonymously and it's currently running a deal Three years of VPN for only 139 a month with a 30-day money back guarantee I'll repeat that for those in the back three years of VPN for only 139 a month with a 30-day money back guarantee This deal won't last long so if you want to get in on the action click the link in the description below to get started Brothers sisters Non-binary siblings. I've done it. I have found the worst thing That that there is this is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long For for many years I have thought and I have said that the Lovely Bones would never be beat I would never find a worse book or Well anything really but mostly I've talked about like yes, that's Worst book ever. I will never find anything worse and Maybe it's on me for tempting fate. No, I was correct for about nine years, but then along came the way of the Shadow Wolves by Steven Seagal and Normally I have my notes written out. I just I have them on my laptop this time because Like I there's too much to write by hand Okay, normally I write by hand because it just it takes longer It forces me to think about it more and it just sticks in my head better But this there was just there was too much like there's Probably four or five times more notes in this than I would have otherwise had and that would just be a giant waste of paper And I just no I'm not doing it and also Like if you're wondering why I might sound a little different. It's because if you missed my last video I'm recovering from surgery and The inside of my mouth is just different than it used to be so I'm still getting used to talking this way, but you know, that's That that's neither here nor there. Yes, I have way more notes than I ever would have before Although admittedly a lot of them are like on the background of this book and the author of it or authors I should say because it was actually kind of written by three people But Steven Seagal is the one whose name is on there because he's the most famous one I really love reading celebrity books because they're always terrible and they're always terrible in an entertaining way Because they're made by people who just have no idea how the real world works, you know they're trapped in that bubble of wealth and Fame and just they don't know how regular people live anymore if they ever did and they also just have no writing experience and They have no chance to really get better and they don't have any proper editors to help clean things up because just by attaching their name to it They're guaranteed a certain number of sales So when someone who is that up their own ass writes a book it makes for some pretty funny results and Obviously this whole series of me doing really long in depth reviews kind of started with Hilary Duff's elixir Now I assumed Steven Seagal's book would be kind of the same as other celebrity books and It sort of is it's Horrible and wrong in so many ways that it's honestly kind of difficult to know where to start Because like it tries to be an action-packed Political thriller, but the tone falls somewhere between the room and the naked gun now.   Well, it's full title is the way of the shadow wolves the deep state and the hijacking of America It is the tale of John Nantan goad who is a tribal police officer in Arizona And he uncovers a sinister conspiracy to destroy the United States And he has to fight back using martial arts as well as his magical Indian spirit powers I'm gonna say right now. This book is pretty racist now on this corner of the internet The Onision trilogy is famous because all of the books are just so Fascinatingly bad Like the thing about that is that a normal person could not write those like even if they tried on Purpose to make something that bad They just they just couldn't you first need to create Onision the man and in order to make Onision the man You need to have the perfect combo of narcissism unearned fame Stupidity sexual hang-ups unresolved daddy issues and complete inability to take criticism. That's very rare But Steven Seagal has all that in a lot of ways He's kind of the pre-internet Onision or maybe Onision is the millennial Steven Seagal It's it's really not important But like you learn enough about this guy and you get a glimpse into his psyche it starts to make sense how he could make something like this and There are a lot of similarities between the two of them though like in broad strokes They're both thoroughly unlikable Uncharismatic untalented people who just stumbled into a large amount of fame and success and I'll be honest I'm gonna go a lot into Steven Seagal and So you have an idea of like what his mindset was when he made this and what the context of this thing is and if you want to skip ahead then Go for it like it'll just go right to the actual book part But trust me having the context I think will make this a lot better So I'm willing to bet a lot of you have heard of him in at least vague terms a lot of you are probably thinking like Oh, okay. Yeah, he was some action star from the 80s and 90s who just kind of faded into a relevance around 20 years ago and That's that that's not wrong. Most of you are pretty young So you might not have even seen any of his movies and you barely know the name, but like this man Learning about his life has been a dive into insanity. I know far more about Steven Seagal than any human being ever should I could honestly make like a two-hour video just about him But I'm not going to do that if if you're curious part of the research for this video was listening to two episodes of the behind the bastards podcast where they did talk about Steven Seagal and I haven't listened to any other any other parts of that podcast So I can't speak for its quality overall, but the ones on Steven Seagal are really good and they are very funny So Steven Seagal in addition to you know being a movie star. He's he's just a habitual liar Which is very weird like he's claimed a lot of things which are very easy to verify Are false like he's claimed to be a mafia hitman a student of Morihei Ueshiba Who was the founder of Aikido, which was definitely not true because he died when Steven was like 15 years old He claimed to be a former Navy SEAL a CIA operative and he claims that he fought the Yakuza and the thing is he'll sometimes make these claims in front of people Who he got the stories from like he makes friends with CIA operatives and former Navy SEALs and stuff And then they'll tell him stories about what they did and then he'll Tell those same stories to other people and sometimes he'll do it in front of them. It's it's very weird He also claims to speak Japanese fluently, which is actually true Yeah, from what I've seen he actually does speak fluent Japanese, which honestly good on him That's a very difficult language to learn He's also a prolific sexual predator. I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail on that But he has harassment and assaults on a lot of different women going back to the early 90s Like he's been in court over this. It's like The dude is definitely a serial rapist.  He can't make any relationships work in fact his first wife he married in Japan and he actually stole her savings and Left the country without actually divorcing her and then he married a second woman illegally and then he tried to marry a third woman while still being illegally married to the first two and Just like Onision He's done a lot of different projects over the years all of which he's bad at like that They're both like the opposite of Renaissance men, you know Onision has a musical career He's done YouTube comedy and he tried to run a cult one time and he tried writing books and he just sucked at all of them like Stuck to go has also done a lot the thing about his acting career, which is what he's most famous for is that Every movie he was ever in was terrible like he's an awful actor. He can't emote He can't make facial expressions, which would be acceptable if he started off that way and he wanted to learn Because admittedly some actors have started off pretty bad and then they've gotten better over time like I think Cara Delevingne has actually gotten a lot better over time and Channing Tatum as well like when he started off his career. He was terrible, but he's Genuinely a really funny actor now. I think and but Seagal never had any desire to get better So he never did. Here's some clips if you're doubting me Like every film that he makes just has this ridiculous tough guy persona, which is mixed with his inherent laziness like Every fight he just wins without a sweat. He foils the bad guys plans every time without a sweat He just gets the girl without a sweat, which again if you've read the Onision trilogy that probably sounds familiar and His later movies. I'm not making this up.   The only good movie he ever made was under siege Like I'm not even joking like I mean I mean that Unironically like it's a genuinely good movie. Some of his others are fun to watch and laugh at but under siege is just a fun cheesy action flick The villains are really over the top. They're a lot of fun and they kind of contrast with Steven Seagal's Corpse like emotional range, so it kind of works But even beyond that he's been you know a stuntman and he's actually been known to hit other Stuntmen during scenes instead of pretending hitting them like you're supposed to do He's such a tool.   I say was because he hasn't done a push-up in 30 years In fact, that that's what he did for a long time And he only got his first movie role because a talent agent named Michael Ovitz made a bet that he could make the most Uncharismatic tool in Los Angeles famous and he just gave him a role in a movie or Possibly Ovitz was bribed or threatened by the mafia. It's actually It's actually kind of unclear. It just go with whatever sounds the most fun for you for you But he also had a musical career with two studio albums and he actually did go around touring He was in a blues band. The music is terrible by the way In fact a couple years ago He was supposed to be at a blues festival in Estonia But he was kicked out because he publicly supported the Russian annexation of Crimea. I think that is this 100% true He was also a sheriff's deputy in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana Even though he was never officially certified as being a cop like He never got the proper training or anything not not just that he wasn't just a volunteer cop He was in charge of their SWAT training like they had a reality TV show about this and everything it was it was nuts and the thing is he used to be a deputy because Around ten years ago. He got charged with human trafficking and the charges only got dropped when he paid his accuser half a million dollars So, you know feel free to draw your own conclusions from that at some point He converted to Tibetan Buddhism Which like okay, that's totally fine. I don't have any issues with that But he officially had himself declared a llama Which is a holy man that reincarnates by choice, which means he's he's one of the highest-ranking people in Tibetan Buddhism He's one step below the Dalai Lama Specifically he claims to be the reincarnation of a monk who founded a monastery 400 years ago And obviously he's now an author with Way of the Shadow Wolves Mark my words one day someone is going to get an Oscar for playing Steven Seagal in a movie Like just it's going to happen because his life is nuts and I have not even Kind of gone into all the detail that I could have now as I said Politics are really baked into this book like it it's impossible to avoid it entirely But I will avoid it whenever possible now the thing is I'm only gonna like talk about it when it's particularly Egregious like when there's really obvious logical flaws in there Or when it's just a really big part of the story that I have to bring up or something like that But I'm still going to be leaving the majority of the claims in here out So if you're watching this later and you're thinking James you said you were gonna leave out most of the politics But you're still talking a lot about it. I know like there's still a lot and I left most of it out Now as I said there were three authors that worked on this kind of and all three of them Are deeply involved with right-wing political movements like first up is former sheriff Joe arpaio who? Used to be the sheriff of Maricopa County, which is where the city of Phoenix is located And he's also an unsuccessful congressional candidate like he he writes a really brief forward to this book Where he claims to be the regional director of the DEA office in Mexico in Latin America Which is untrue or he claims that he used to be that it's still untrue Then he goes on about how drugs were coming across the border until President Trump scared them off with his mighty shlong The whole world is out to get him specifically the deep state is destroying America Even though they actually already control America like why would they want to straight? It's not very interesting and it doesn't make much sense Arpaio is kind of unimportant So I'm not gonna point out how as sheriff he forced inmates to live in a place that he himself described as a concentration camp It would also be rude of me to point out how he stole over a hundred million dollars of taxpayer money and Who could forget how the US Department of Justice determined that his department was guilty of some of the worst profiling in American history It would be really rude of me to point all that out So I'm not going to do so but despite all of this hardship He still continued to ignore court orders which got him charged with contempt of court for which he was pardoned by the former president Really the deep state has been out to get him for so long that he's been able to do whatever he wants for years with impunity Like his his life must be so hard. Hello guys editor James here I was just doing some last-minute research for this video and it turns out that Joe Arpaio Despite writing the forward for this book and despite writing in the forward How realistic this book is and how it's just like his life and career and yada yada at some point He admitted that he's never read it late Why would you do that like whether you're promoting this book out of ideological agreement with it or just because you're being paid? Why why would you ever do that? All that does is make your endorsement completely worthless. I I Don't know that that just kind of caught me off guard and I figured you should all know about it, too the other author is Tom Morrissey and I Don't know if there's much to say about him like he was the former head of the Arizona Republican Party And he is currently the mayor of the town of Payson, Arizona He's been a politician and a law enforcement officer for several decades though So, you know, he's a real political outsider Which makes him the perfect person to talk about how all politicians and cops are in on this nefarious conspiracy And then there's Steven Seagal who has a history of political activism, too He's personal friends with Vladimir Putin as well as a couple of other Dictators and dictator light type dudes And he spends a lot of time talking about how awesome he is and how awesome other authoritarian leaders are Here's him giving a sword to the president of Venezuela now to be fair I don't disagree with Steven Seagal on everything like he's actually spent a lot of time advocating for Environmental protections and animal rights with which I agree with so good on him for that I just wish he took animal rights more seriously when he drove a tank into someone's house and killed his dog Yes, he really did that I'm gonna take you to the bank senator Trent to the blood bank But finally after all that let's get to talking about the actual book It took a lot longer than I wanted it to but you know Here we are and the best place to start is with the beginning and by the beginning. I mean the cover So the cover of this book is just a picture of a man with a wolf's face in the background Kind of cheesy, but honestly on the surface. It could be a lot worse than that Once you dig below the surface though There's a lot of problems like problem one there are these weird black lines over the wolf's face Like I don't even know if they really pick up on camera But like at first I saw them and I thought they were like eyelashes or hairs that fell From my head and we're on there, but I tried wiping it off and like no that's part of the book and that this is a new Copy by the way, it's not like this was used and the previous owner was drawn on it Like that's just that's just something they screwed up on and then the cover model is just Steven Seagal, which Yeah, just geez man It kind of looks like they photoshopped his face onto a slimmer younger body Except that his face is really low resolution. It's like 360p It's very weird and then on the thing is on the back We have another photo of Steven Seagal for the author photo, which you know Makes sense and the thing is that author photo is about 30 years old Now you obviously want to choose a good photo of yourself for that So choosing an older one is understandable if a tad vain But then on the front we have current Steven Seagal Like that defeats the purpose and then Tom Morris's photo makes it look like he's gonna call me smooth skin and ask If I have any spare caps and problem number three This makes it very clear that John the main character of the book is just a self-insert it protagonist Like when Hillary Duff was the cover model for elixir like it's really obvious there that She just wanted to insert herself into the story and it's very very cringy But it's even worse here because John is an American Indian and Steven Seagal is not no matter how much buckskin He wears now Steven Seagal is one quarter Cherokee in that he weighs one fourth as much as a Jeep grand Cherokee But he's he's not Native American. He's not an American Indian Even though on the back he claims to be Cherokee because every white person who claims to have American Indian ancestry claims to be Cherokee for some reason It's generally frowned upon to pretend that to be a race that you're not Steven. I hope you are aware of that I mean Taylor Lautner isn't an Indian either, but he played one for five movies For what it's worth Steven Seagal's family his mother's family were German English and Dutch and his father's family were Russian Jews The thing is he has a very long history of pretending to be other races like during his reddit AMA Which you should read because it's hysterical. He claimed that he was once in an all-black band Which is impossible because if he was in the band, then it wasn't all black He claimed to be Italian one time He's claimed to be Asian in a movie review one time is is weird now. He's pretending to be an American Indian, which He's just whatever is most convenient to him at the time. I suppose I Am a little bit Asian and I'm a Russian Mongol and I'm Russian My father was a Russian Mongol. So these people are Russian Mongols I have some Italian on my mother's side and I'm Russian My family are from Vladivostok and Belarus and you know Okay editor James back here with one more thing I have to add Apparently Seagal has also claimed at some point to be either Kalmyk or Buriat I hope I'm pronouncing both those right and if you've never heard of those they're both pretty small ethnic groups that are native to Russia and I I feel like it goes without saying that no, it's he's not either of those It's not true. He claims that his grandfather was one of those But he's not sure which but the thing is they live on opposite ends of Russia. They're they're very far apart like they're they're related ethnic groups, but That's kind of like saying that your grandfather is either Romanian or Portuguese, but you're not sure which it's It's just so odd that he would lie about things that are so easily verified You actually open it up and look at the contents. There is the standard. Oh, this book is a work of fiction Yada yada message it, but then it's followed by but remember truth comes in many forms So is this a realistic depiction of exactly what the real world is like or is it a work of fiction? Make up your mind guys. As I said, there's a short foreword written by Arpaio. It has factual inaccuracies It's just an old man complaining that the government is out to get him despite being part of the government It's not that interesting. Then you have a preface coming after that, which is also not that interesting It's full of leading questions to try and make you believe What they're saying which you can do with pretty much anything It's like if I started asking people is it possible that Steven Seagal is a pedophile like that? That's a leading question. So then we go to chapter one Chap tribal police America's frontline in the desert. Is this where the actual story starts? No, of course not.  The first chapter is main character John in a movie theater watching a documentary about shadow wolves now shadow wolves are a group of legendary Indian warriors with magical powers how these powers work and how the shadow wolves work and Why they weren't used to fight the Americans and other colonizers who came in back in the day is Never explained or brought up So there's also a couple of paragraphs about how the US about how badly the US government treated Indians over the years, which is not wrong But you should really keep that in mind as the book goes on It also tends to leave how regular citizens treated them out of it Native Americans have an innate and powerful spiritual connection with the earth and its creatures and understanding of the true nature Of all that is on this planet and how it works in the perfect balance of cause and effect An elite group within the Native American communities known as shadow wolves are part of this perfect balance and are the Best of the best with the ability to see what can't be seen with the eyes They know without having to be taught they blend easily with the night true right from wrong is ingrained in their souls Which makes them able to stand against evil no matter the cost to see footprints on rocks Okay, so we're two pages in and we're already knee-deep in shit For starters the worst way you can start a story is with exposition even if it's good exposition That's just the worst way to to start because it feels almost like you're doing homework at that point You're like, whoa, this is a lot here. I Please slow down But this is not good exposition because John already knows about shadow wolves and John is a shadow wolf Why is he watching a movie about them? Don't know but here we are and Obviously all those statements that were super vague like about they know without having to be taught they can see footprints on rocks They know true right from wrong like is this all meant to be metaphorical or literal like by the end of the book I'm still unsure This is what's known as telling not showing But then you're also still not giving much information and then you continue telling over and over throughout the whole book It's also kind of racist like you know this description of Native Americans kind of falls into that exotic mystic noble savage stereotype, which I Suppose it's a positive stereotype if anything which is really It's still not good And he also refers to them as Native Americans now you might notice that throughout most of this I've been calling them American Indians or Indians because that's what most of them prefer to be called and The fact that this book goes with a different name is kind of an indicator of how little knowledge The three white dudes who wrote this thing have of the subject matter and how they didn't bother researching at all You're gonna see that come up a lot Chapter two deep state sign in the desert The clouds a brilliant orange were hanging on the horizon with sun rays lighting them from bottom up as the daylight Crept behind the mountains off in the distance But not too far from where a man named John Goad was standing a dust devil was dancing across a place between him and the setting Sun This tall lean man who in the approaching darkness could have easily been confused with a saguro cactus was breathing in the beautiful scene before him All right first That's a lot of obnoxious run-on sentences You should really learn to chill out with those because it's difficult to read especially when you're reading out loud Second we have yet another in the long line of right-wing thrillers with a big Protagonist that the author projects on to the main difference is that Steve and seagull actually is pretty tall So they had to make sure that we know that John is lean Because the gall is fucking fat I'm gonna keep bringing that up because you you don't get to act like some big badass when that's the case And it is mentioned that he's tall or big 48 times in this book. I counted 48 times Like Jesus dude, just wear all your insecurities on your sleeve. Why don't you so we get like a classic backstory about John's life? Which is you know more exposition that's Slow down. I don't want to enjoy myself too much, but yeah, it's a pretty basic You know, he was an Indian who grew up on Reservation he joined the Marines and then after he left the Marines he became a tribal police officer And then while he was a kid his grandfather taught him the old ways now every time Old ways comes up in this book It's in quotes. I I don't know why I also don't know what the old ways are like I think it's the techniques of the shadow wolves and how those work but not much is ever explained and there's not much info given and That would be fine if they're if we had the opportunity to figure things out on our own, but we didn't get that either so This is basically all we learn about John as a person throughout the whole book like he's a good fighter and that's his backstory Beyond that I suppose he's like an ultra nationalist. Sorry Patriot, but beyond that there's really nothing there We don't learn much about His relationships his goals in life his reasons for joining the Marines or his reasons for becoming a cop Like I want to criticize this, but there's honestly nothing there to criticize He's just an empty shell that the authors are projecting on to and There's not even much to critique about his beliefs because he's just repeating the author's beliefs So going through this he mentions how the Indians were led down a path of total dependence by the government That That's not how that works They underwent a genocide and then the government felt kind of guilty about it So it decided to provide for them, but they didn't feel that guilty because they don't do a very good job of it So then when things actually start happening Basically, he's way out in the desert by himself a couple of men surround John while he's doing some sort of dance And he's like bidding the sun good nights, which I I What's like this book throws out so many undefined terms and phrases which make no sense And he pretends not to notice the men surrounding him and then a wolf appears and It kisses John on the forehead and then John hides Somehow in the desert with nothing nowhere to hide He somehow does that with no effort and then the men look for him can't find him and then they just disappear and then it just Cuts to a flashback and it explains a lot of information all at once with no passion so basically John met a kid named sweet tooth or sweet tooth is obviously a nickname his real name is Henry But the book uses both those names interchangeably, which makes it kind of confusing to read about sometimes great, but I'll just be referring to him as sweet tooth throughout all this and Basically sweet tooth was just out camping in the middle of the desert At a couple of points actually and he keeps seeing these black SUVs driving throughout the desert at nighttime And he thinks it's suspicious so he came and told the police which that actually makes sense You know, they're right along the border with Mexico It could be cartel activity or smuggling or something like it, you know It's worth looking into at least and so sweet tooth takes him out to a campsite where he was This was a remote area loaded with snakes and scorpions and despite sweet tooth's claim of wanting to be alone It made no sense for him to be out there in the middle of the night alone Okay, if I read every bad line in here I would just be reading you the whole book So I'm really only giving you the worst but that should give you an idea like I want to be alone But it doesn't make sense for you to be alone Okay, whatever so John claims in his narration that the deep state and the media are working with drug lords to bring in Illegal immigrants and drugs no proof of this is ever given by the way like he just says that but Like he never finds any evidence of it or presents any evidence of it. The thing is this is fiction They you could easily make something up to support your views, but the authors of this can't even do that They're just saying huh my beliefs are so obvious. I won't even bother explaining myself like that That's the attitude they have with this which is Kind of an indictment of how little they think about their beliefs Plus it's just boring for the protagonist to already have knowledge about everything that comes up in the book like He doesn't have to work for any knowledge of the consp- conspiracy or anything like that Like he just already knows it so we don't get to watch him find anything out or anything like that.  But a jihadi is a person. It's a noun. It's not an adjective You don't use jihadi to describe something like that would be like calling something a soldier country Like it just doesn't make sense grammatically You're just throwing scary words out there without understanding what they mean like there's no research Any of this it would have taken you 30 seconds to learn all that Uh, but you know back to john and company He follows some footprints and he somehow knows that they aren't sweet tooth without checking Like he sees them and he doesn't go hey sweet tooth Let me look at your footprints or something so that he can check like he just already knows Uh, and he keeps going on random tangents too Like it's a little hard to keep this on track because of that but There's one tangent about how john has the spirit of the snake in his bloodline Giving him power over some people and many snakes I don't know what that means either. Um Anyway, some coyotes arrive John scares them off by talking in some other language Which is weird because I thought he had power over snakes and not coyotes But all right, you're you're the author here. I I won't uh, I won't get in your way He sat absolutely still watching closely as the big man holstered his weapon and knelt down picking up something small He examined it slowly the young native american didn't know it But john had discovered a tooth lying on a flat rock There was a slight blood trail leading away from where he found it A strange energy came over john as he folded it into a page. He tore from a small notebook He kept in his pocket Okay, so that was just not as bad as a lot of other lines But it's clumsy is the thing because it I think it's trying to do omniscient narrator Where you all always know what everyone is thinking all the time But it's just kind of switching back and forth way too quick So it's just going this person knows this this person other person knows that And it gets a little confusing and it also gives up any chance for mystery or tension So anyways though, um, they find a mutilated dead woman buried uh Or buried very shallowly in the desert and Sweet tooth mentions that he thinks the mexican military are doing maneuvers in arizona That's stupid because maneuvers are big and you can't keep that under wraps And it's also stupid because it never comes back up Like they just mentioned it this one time and never again Uh and finally sweet tooth like gives his whole story He basically says that his brother started making money somehow and bringing it home And then he went missing and sweet tooth thinks that his brother is somehow involved in cartel business and he also mentions that Arabs were with the cartels as they were working Mexicans no americans just mexicans john pushed him trying to get a fix on whether or not They might be deep state operatives No, they weren't american but he said that there were these heavy breathing arab guys coming out with them Heavy breathing. What was making them breathe heavy? No, it doesn't have nothing to do with breathing It's like the way they talk man. He said they sound like they're guardling when they speak. They got some bad accents Okay, the thing is if they're trying to sneak into the country, there's easier ways to do that Because then just pretending to be mexican because just because you can't tell the difference Doesn't mean that the mexicans can't tell the difference But anyways, uh john calls up the other police and the csi shows up and john leaves but he keeps the tooth that he hid earlier and Then he goes back to shadow wolf headquarters and that's that's chapter three Where you been moose bellamy one of the task force members asked when john walked through the door into the squad room John didn't respond because his attention was taken by what was lying on his desk It was a picture of a beautiful young woman posing in a seductive red dress Her hair was copper flaring around her tan face. Her eyes captivated him immediately. Who's this? He nodded at the photo some gal who says she needs to talk with you and right away What's with the picture john asked curiously. I guess it's a motivator to get you in touch right away That would work for me bellamy had a smile on his face She say what this was about John took off his black jacket which had a patch on the left sleeve with it with an insignia of a wolf Encapsulated in an arrowhead and draped it across the back of his chair She said it was about something you might be interested in knowing claimed. She's an investigative reporter following a story you might want to hear so Steven seagull thinks that women reporters get in touch with their inside sources by physically mailing pinups of themselves He he thinks that that's how women Get access to things. I mean that's sexist, but Okay, it would have been so easy to look up how investigative reporters get in touch with Yeah, whatever whatever, man So anyways bellamy the other shadow wolf we get a bit of information about him apparently he can win any fight by believing that he can By that logic, I could beat connor mcgregor by just believing in myself really hard Or by standing still and waiting for him to turn his body slightly. I guess that could work too so then john spends several pages relaying what just happened to bellamy and This sort of thing happens throughout the book by the way like It's a miserable fraction of the word count like things will happen and then John will go to other characters and relay everything that happened to those other characters And it just happens over and over again like it could just be a sentence or two Like they could just say oh john relayed what had happened with sweet tooth to bellamy bellamy looked concerned Like there just a sentence or two. It's that easy John also thinks that the dead woman was there to send a message How how is that sending a message her body was hidden Do you think that when you send a message you put it somewhere where no one will see it? That's that's not what a Message is steven. How do you how do you think this works? Okay, and then john goes to talk to his boss whose name is armando and tells him that they should investigate sweet tooth campsite Why does he think this well because his gut told him to Okay, the thing is throughout this entire book Basically everything that john does is just because his gut told him to like it's a stupid excuse that they go back to over and over and over again Because they can't think of any real reasons why a real detective would look into this But the thing is this makes sense like it makes sense why you would go look at sweet tooth campsite That's what an actual investigator would do So it's like the one time in the book that he's following the evidence and they still use the gut excuse Which is so weird to me because sagal Morrissey they both worked in law enforcement. They should know how criminal investigations work But apparently they don't so they go there.  Oh my god Just oh my god No no no no no So armando decides to put john in charge of the task force for the time being I'm putting john here in charge the five foot eight inch fire plug of a man knotted toward the big man Okay, first of all you should never use exact height and weights when you're describing characters because it's just too specific And it allows for a lot less imagination for the readers like and it bogs down the pros Like you should just say things like tall is a tree or skinny as a twig like those work a lot better and Quite frankly the height is like the only description we get of most of the characters if that Like pretty much every time it introduces someone it's like a man named Dave came up and like well, what does dave look like? I don't know and Yeah, you should also avoid using the same word twice in a sentence Like he goes man and the man again like it gets weird So then uh someone mentions that john doesn't usually rush into things Which is really weird because john spends this entire book rushing into things over and over again Look You should show And not tell but if you're going to tell you need to have it match up with what you show And then they introduce A bunch of other shadow wolves including dian higgins who is a dea agent who can hold her own But she never does anything in the book and then another agent named bonnie sims who also Never does anything in the book and then they all just head off into the desert And some interesting things go on a pack of four-legged coyotes ran past john's vehicle without stopping to investigate As opposed to Six-legged coyotes So while they're just out wandering the desert they see a border patrol vehicle driving around And rather than just see thinking oh, we're near the border. There's a border patrol vehicle. Nothing weird going on here john has a tail put on it because his gut tells him to And then he also guesses where it's going like they're out in the middle of the desert There's no roads or anything nearby and he's like hey, we need to put a tail on them like well We don't know where they're going and he just he just guesses where they're going and he He happens to be 100 correct in that so he manages to put a tail on them without any issue And the thing is if that just happened once or twice That's fine Like you're allowed to have characters guess at things and get it right or have a coincidence to get them out of trouble Once or twice But it happens constantly. It's just reality shifting around protagonist coon to make his life easier And then off screen by the way Other police pursue the border patrol vehicle because it turns out.  It's all described in two paragraphs Don't give me too much excitement steven. It might raise my heart rate So then john arrives at the scene and he tells the others what's going on He's like, oh, there's a fake border patrol vehicle And we don't know what they're up to but we know it's not good And we also learned that the shadow wolves share a knowing from their spiritual connection like Does that mean they have a hive mind? If they have a hive mind, why do they talk to each other at all because they should already know everything This is the problem with not explaining characters powers Okay, you just leave the audience confused like they're gonna be thinking. Oh, why don't they just do this or can't they do that? And at other times they we just learn out of nowhere like oh, they can do this And it turns out to be a massive deus ex machina And that happens a lot in this book like every time Uh, they're in trouble. They just reveal a new shadow wolf power And none of them are very impressive You'd think with so many at least one of them would be kind of neat But no he can just he just has power over some people and many snakes And so all excitement and interest is just gone So the fake border patrol are holding people hostage in a house off the road A loud wailing woman's scream came from the house They knew something bad was happening or about to happen because of the nervous intruders or might hurt the couple Okay, we you literally just needed to say The woman was screaming and we get the picture like you don't need to keep going after that Like it just bogs everything down especially with action like you want everything to be you know quick quick quick because That's what this scene is supposed to be. It's supposed to be exciting And uh anyways john decides to go in before the swat team arrives because there's no time to wait for the swat team Which is exactly the wrong thing to do like you're If you go in guns blazing you're going to get hostages killed in the crossfire Like what you're supposed to do in this situation is set up a perimeter Get a hostage negoti negotiator like you don't go in shooting unless the hostage or hostage shaker starts killing people like John and company are so obsessed with being bad asses that they just throw away common sense and all their training I'm sure that says nothing about the authors who all worked in law enforcement So they go in they save one of the hostages the gunmen retreat to another room with the other hostage and then they say come out assholes and Then the bad guys surrender Like it was it was just it was that easy It's impossible to get engaged when it's that easy like that The point of action scenes is for the characters to struggle in reaching a goal And for that struggle to be shown in an exciting way Without that it's just noise Like sometimes you can get away with having an action scene with no point or that's too easy in visual form like in a movie or something but You really can't do that in books They had functioned like a well oiled machine that had just saved two innocent lives All lives matter. Do they not I feel like I should criticize that but I'm also not sure what point he's making Um, so we're just gonna move on Chapter four inside the federal building.  You are supposed to know where every local lea is all of the time and give those people clear passage This is a presidential priority one more screw-up and you're headed for alaska Dogface looked around the table every person in the room was a 34th grade bubba with a lifetime of service to the cause And each was in one of the top three positions of their respective agency for the southwestern fema district sixth territory Okay, there's several things wrong here one cartel jihadists Makes no goddamn sense In addition to just tons of ideological differences Jihadis like in the world that this book is trying to create jihadis want to destroy america like in reality, it's A little wider than that like i'm not gonna defend jihadis But like it's not every one of them just going. Yeah, let's destroy america.  Like it's not explained here. It's not explained elsewhere There's even a glossary at the back, which is like the most unhelpful glossary ever which Does not explain what a 34th degree bubba is It just says yeah, it's a bubba of 34th degree like wow. Thanks for the help asshole um It's just someone who's important in this massive conspiracy Like I did a little bit of outside side research. I think that's Uh an illuminati thing But I i'm not totally sure and also they don't really mention the illuminati at any other point in this book Look, I shouldn't have to do outside research to understand the setting All right, if this is supposed to be a warning to people in the real world because this is this is real life Real life events. It's fiction inspired by the real world If that's what it's supposed to be then warn us. Otherwise. This is just a masturbatory fantasy So anyways mo goes on to explain the evil plan to his henchmen and to the audience as well by proxy Basically, they're going to use the national guard to bring in 500 g hotties in a night and then spread them around the country Okay, I kind of mentioned this earlier, but there there are much easier ways to bring in terrorists than to Bring in a whole bunch of other people in a massive conspiracy Which has hundreds or thousands of co-conspirators and then leave tons of evidence behind like there's easier ways to do it They could just have fake passports or they could use Americans who are already radicalized for one reason or another They could smuggle them in in shipping containers like these things are so much easier And if this was a real thing then that's what they would be doing And plus it's later revealed That they bring in over a thousand jihadis a month and they've been doing this for a while So why do you need a new plan to bring in 500 in a night? And if it's not a new plan, why are you explaining it to all your henchmen? They should already know this It's also revealed that both the american and mexican police are aware that there's something going on And that they're moving to investigate or to stop it And the bad guys to distract from this and prevent them from doing that are going to declare the yucatan independent Man, you can't convince us that this huge deep state conspiracy is so dangerous when you're also making them so Obvious and incompetent like they don't work very well as villains in this case either Like it's just it's no good from a story perspective or from Trying to convince people of your ideals perspective And the best part of that whole chapter is that agent moe never comes back He's never mentioned again nor is the whole yucatan crisis that they were going to cause ever mentioned again Like it just it It's gone. It's gone now that that whole bit was just there to give the audience some exposition So then we go back to john who is interrogating the three prisoners that they took after the hostage situation And i'm gonna tell you right now this takes up a huge chunk of the rest of the book Like we're barely getting started and there's just a huge chunk of the rest is taken up by just them interrogating these three guys And it's a little it's really annoying to read about because None of them get names at first so they just refer to them as the first man or the young man and Their names kind of switch around too.  You got something to say say it He was pushing hard but getting nowhere with bellamy the law man got up slowly from his chair and backed out of the room Never changing the expression on his face or breaking eye contact with the man a cold man glaring at him I I suppose that's one way to start an interrogation So they try talking to one of them with the your friends already to cut a deal trick And it's like oh They're gonna leave you high and dry. You better tell us something or you're you're screwed And then it doesn't work very well. And then one of the shadow wolves a guy named Noach, I believe Uh, he managed to get one prisoner to like him actually It happens completely off screen because why would we want to see the interesting part? But you know he he gets one of them to like him and the prisoner's talking a little bit and he says They're working with pakistanis who are pretending to be mexican by speaking spanish Okay, I know I already said this but like just because you can't tell the difference Doesn't mean that they can't and later they mentioned and even before this I mentioned all the bad guys are speaking arabic They do not speak arabic in pakistan The people there are not arab like they they are a couple of different ethnic groups and they speak a bunch of different languages arabic is not one of them like Jesus christ Dude, it's not that hard to learn things So then while they're trying to get them to talk Some federal agents arrive and say hey, we're gonna take the prisoners into custody Like hell you will was john's instant response These three belong to us until we say that they don't Not anymore.  So john tries to act all tough and he refuses to hand him over like You don't have a choice in this case man federal law enforcement is the highest they can override tribal police and the agent but by the name his The agent's name is wilson and john Apparently gives him a look Which is where he like gives no expression on his face and it's like an ancient chinese technique or something Here i thought steven segal never moving his facial muscles was because he was a terrible actor nope turns out it was An ancient chinese technique that he learned when he was in Japan In an instant john goad was gone and wilson knew he was not going to prevail over the shadowy man Who passed through him like a heavy wind passes through a forest Yeah, you know the best way to make your villains intimidating is to constantly remind the audience how scared they are of the heroes And how amazing the heroes are That's how you make us scared. Jesus christ this this fails on every level.  I've never bought hashish I don't think it would be that hard for a criminal organization to get a hold of it But I also don't think they would have some newbie do it You know if they if they just have the new guy do it He might do something dumb like blab to his brother and then his brother goes off and tells the cops You really believe this is that deep john?  Why wouldn't they do this in mexico where they wouldn't have the risk of being caught? Especially if there are mexicano impartantes protecting them Doesn't add up Yeah, it doesn't You're pointing out your own plot holes. What why are you doing that? So they go back to one prisoner and that one prisoner Says he'd never betray his friends and then we go to the next chapter, which is a flashback So the prisoner uh his name is hoven by the way It's back when he was a kid and he was orphaned by cartel violence along with some of his friends And then a hit man sees them one day And he has them kill a guy for him and after that he just kind of takes them under his wing and Sort of raises them. I guess it's implied that he's meant to be like a father figure towards them But it it never really comes back But it this bit really annoys me especially because He gives one of the kids a gun and says all right kill that dude and the kid goes Oh, they use that cliche where he's like, I don't know how to use a gun. He's like, oh, it's easy Just point and shoot No, it's not that easy guys It's more complicated than that. Okay, Steven Seagal is a marksman trainer for the police Like he should know this it kind of makes me think that that those cops can't aim for shit now but Like I've just seen that in so many movies and stuff and it really irks me because no guns are not that Easy to fire like literally all they could do is just go like, okay. This is the safety here You want to line up the sights there and then you just slowly squeeze the trigger Don't jerk it and like just that little bit of instruction would not turn you into an expert marksman But it would be enough to get you started at least but More important than all of that is that this flashback this this chapter did not need to be here in fact The flashback would have been a little bit more effective if it was just a couple of Sentences of vague memories like it would let us fill in the blanks And like I said, most of this doesn't come back. You know, it's not important Uh, who is uh the guy the hitman was hard to talk. It wasn't important who the hitman was or How exactly he joined the cartel like just have some vague memories of like Oh, he was a kid and he shot somebody and lets us fill in the blanks ourselves And we can start to kind of feel sorry for this dude and also understand like why he wound up in this position So then the next chapter in the modern day John manages to convince agent wilson not to take the prisoners back because he says he's on the cusp of getting them to give up information And wilson agrees to this Why the fuck does wilson agree to this? so For starters, I don't think a regular federal agent would would do this Like I don't think you would have the authority to do this Like he's either doing what his boss told him or he's following protocol. Like he can't just unilaterally decide Okay, I won't take them back from you And we find out pretty quickly that wilson is in on the conspiracy Like he's here to he's here to take the prisoners so that they don't give up any sensitive information to people and Because that would interfere with their plans So why would you allow others access to this information? And you're probably thinking that the information that john takes from the prisoners is what he uses to save the day and Yeah, that's exactly what happens sort of we'll we'll get there when we get there, but Just the whole plot revolves around the villains being dumbasses This is not goodbye my friend think of it more as see you soon because you will See me soon trust me warned the head agent Armando thought this guy takes himself way too seriously the sign of a true narcissistic prick Oh my god, this is this is so close to self-awareness Oh my god, this is so close so close to self-awareness not not just for john and most of the other good guys in this book but for sigal himself like just You're right there. You're right there man. Just need that little push So off-screen again, because why would we want to see the interesting bits? uh, noch got more information out of the prisoner he realized this information to john and It seems like the prisoner is not on board with everything his bosses are doing and john says, okay We should follow up on this because his gut is telling him something big is going on and that it leads all the way back to washington dc Again, this is based on no evidence or anything. It's just his gut tells him that and his gut is never wrong throughout this entire book I was not born on a fucking turnip truck, man And then we go to the next chapter this next chapter follows a mexican intelligent agent Named jose jose Maria Gutierrez de poros the top counterintelligence officer in mexico who reported directly to the president of mexico Was pissed seriously pissed People i need some ideas the deep state to the north is on the move We are seeing 1,000 jihadists a month going north and they seem to have almost miraculous powers both here in mexico And across the border as if they were on diplomatic passports all expenses paid Okay, so in addition to the plot hole about the number of jihadis that i already mentioned This is a really clumsy way to introduce a character Like if the last name isn't needed then just don't put the last name in there Like you could have just said jose the top counterintelligence officer and then kept going for that and You should also not use the same word twice in a sentence like i said He uses the word mexican twice in a sentence and it just feels awkward And this is another chapter of a character just like agent moe before This is another chapter of a character who shows up and is never brought back or mentioned again and is just here for exposition And the thing is if you're going to have more chapters like that Just reuse the same person for all of them like just reuse agent moe for all of them So we could actually start to get Maybe not attached to him, but we could at least learn a little bit about him and see him as like the face of the villains or something and All right. Anyways, jose claims that they already own the usa which is asinine Uh and by they i mean like the mexican governments apparently they already own the usa Which again, that's asinine And it's mentioned that they have isa soldiers in mexico that they want to Stop them from doing anything Why are you pointing out your own plot holes, man? Like this this doesn't make sense None of this makes sense like it's constantly mentioned like oh, yeah The mexican government is in on this but then we have the mexican government Clearly not being in on it like which is it? So they're gonna set up an attempt to capture the terrorists before they enter the us because Apparently they care as much about the united states constitution as americans do Like that's a weird idea that a lot of americans have Like this this idea that our constitution is perfect and it's the envy of the whole world and not not really like Other countries have their own for starters like every other country has their own and ours is like a good document Especially for the time period it was written in but it's flawed You know, that's why we've amended it 27 times. It's it's not perfect. It never was And jose never shows up again and the mexicans catching terrorists has never followed up on Every abandoned house in detroit represents an abandoned plot thread from this book Chapter nine cartel prisoners So this is back with john and he goes into flashback mode Unprompted and he thinks back to how His dad just wasn't in the picture. His mom raised him and his brother His brother was an alcoholic and then his brother committed suicide when he was like in his 20s and This is an attempt to humanize john and it almost works, but it It never comes back in any way You know, it's not Uh mentioned how like oh he cares about the other shadow wolves like they're his brothers because his real brother died And now he's super protective of them or anything like that And like it's mentioned he loves his mom like okay, that doesn't tell us much You know later his mom gets kidnapped, but she's not a real character She's more of a mcguffin that they fight over or anything. So We're not attached to her And you don't if that's what you're gonna do with it You don't need to explain why john loves his mom like most people will get it It's also mentioned at this point that john While he is an indian and while he does live in arizona right on the border I don't believe it's ever specified what reservation he lives on because there's a couple but He's not like a navajo or an apache or a hopi or anything like that. He's a mohawk Uh Why are mo why is a mohawk family living in arizona? Like it's not a problem. I guess but it does raise questions Like they could literally just say oh, yeah, we moved here for our mom's job when we were younger and like that that would be fine Maybe the authors just don't know that the mohawk live in the northeast And john thinks about his grandfather teaching him the old ways again And they're just really vague so that the heroes can use them to do Whatever the plot demands and john talks to a prisoner. I think it's supposed to be hoven But he still hasn't told them what his name is so it's he's still unnamed It's still hard to tell which one is which for that very reason And he tells him that the other prisoners cut a deal and They don't believe him and then he takes all the prisoners to the maricopa county jail You're supposed to give them over to federal custody Okay, there there are rules that law enforcement has to follow otherwise They're these cases can get thrown out of court and for criminal criminals can walk free Like if if they did this in real life, then the instant it went to trial The judge would probably throw it out And then john sees the ghost of his grandfather in the desert and he's very surprised by it Chapter 10 death sign So it starts with john trying to contact the reporter that you know left a pin up on his desk Her name is maria by the way and he can't do it like she's not answering her phone and then That might work as a way of like building suspense like we're thinking. Oh no something happened to maria Who killed her? What was it because she was getting too close to figuring out what's going on? But then the book just immediately tells us what's wrong I guess it's because suspense is a myth Like climate change or the female orgasm So basically some men Broke into maria's hotel room They killed her and then they took her body out and dismembered it in the desert On paper, this is a decent plot beat, but when you tell us everything up front There's no time for us to wonder what's wrong or to watch john solving the mystery like imagine if You were watching citizen kane and it started off the same like with people trying to figure out like oh, what does rosebud mean?  Let's try and fix that up clean it up Like they wouldn't necessarily do a good job of it But they would at least attempt to or they might have an editor that would help them clean it up at least like a normal person would do that but These guys omision. They're not normal people So right after maria is killed uh sweet tooth and his brother whose his name is jimmy by the way Remember he's the one that's working with cartels and stuff. They go to visit her room because maria apparently Found out jimmy was involved and called him because she wanted some information from him And the thing is if he's gonna do that if he's gonna go visit this reporter To talk about all the criminal activity. He's been involved on why would he bring his brother? Like his brother doesn't know he's working for cartels.  So they leave and sweet tooth asks like hey, what would you bring me over here for?  What why I I don't understand like nope. You're just we're moving. That's the end of the chapter You know a decent editor could probably cut this book down to a tweet You know what? That's a lie a decent editor would receive the manuscript for this get 10 pages in and then mail back a box of ashes So john is driving with one of the prisoners And he's talking to him and he compares a country to a boat that can only hold a limited number of people Therefore we shouldn't allow immigrants in because that's bad The thing is if you actually believe that then you would want to restrict the number of children That people have to to prevent the population from going too much But you aren't so that says you don't actually believe that Anyways, they bring the prisoner to one of the cops house houses.  Which one is it?  I don't know like If seeing ghost was just a thing that shadow wolves could do then he shouldn't be surprised But every time he sees his grandfather, he's shocked like whoa, it's grandpa like it It doesn't make sense. This is such a weird Plot thread that they bring up like of all the plot threads to bring up an abandon. Why did you stick with this one? And anyways, he talks to armando his boss Briefly, he promises to bring the prisoner in we finally learn that the prisoner's name is haime This might just be Hoven he like he might have just changed his name or this might be one of the other prisoners. I'm not sure but they Take him to the maricopa county jail and they They they let him off like it's just that's it and then that's the end of the chapter and we get another chapter It you can see it's just that much It's just following a villain that has never been mentioned before That we never see again Just for the sake of exposition for the audience This one follows a guy named general clap I could make a joke about that But I'm not going to and he says that they're moving up the timeline And that all the jihadis are there to perform a bunch of simultaneous terrorist attacks all over the country, which is Not that much of a reveal, but okay, sure And they call it operation paperclip 2 Which is a dumb name like Operation paperclip if you didn't know was right after world war two the american government brought in a bunch of like old nazi Scientists and such and gave them jobs and new identities and kind of laundered their reputation basically And as awful as that was the the point of it wasn't to kill americans So the name doesn't even make sense and then general clap says they need to make life hell for any cop that tries to defend the republic like No one talks like this No one has ever talked like this plus that's also not the police's job by the way Like their job is to at least on paper is to enforce the law and keep the peace Like the military is the one for defending the country like All this tells me is that deputies sagal thinks really highly of himself anyways next chapter Chapter 13 deep state shootout So after dropping highway off at the county jail john comes home He walked slowly through the pitch darkness of the desert night to the door of his home He checked his surroundings visually and then stood in silence Listening to the rhythm of the night expressed by the desert creatures that lived mostly hidden all around him He pulled his keys from his pocket and instinctually placed the house key in the lock without looking He heard a door close in the back of the house as he walked in pulling his weapon He ducked down and moved stealthily with the speed of an ocelot toward the noise But when he arrived he found nothing that could have caused it He searched the area and then turned on a light before holstering his weapon He walked into his bedroom and was stunned for a moment at the sight of alicia lying across his bed with one of his shirts on And that was about it Hey, did I scare you little boy? She threw her head back releasing her long black hair and gave a sultry sigh as she devoured him with her eyes She waved him to her Hey, baby nice surprise almost got you killed though He smiled as he moved to her and sat down on the bed slowly kicking off his boots So apparently john has a girlfriend and it just just wasn't mentioned before this because it's very important that steven sigal Sorry, it's very important that john the main character of this book who is not steven sigal gets laid Do you think he keeps his leather jacket on when they have sex? On the plus side there are no awkward sex scenes in this book Which is better than a lot of terrible thrillers So yeah, it turns out that alicia is also a tribal officer and she was off on another assignment Throughout the first part of this book What assignment would keep her away from such important work is never specified, but okay And then they get a call To bring haimei back from the jail because he thinks he's about to be killed So it's back to the jail I love all this back and forth I love it so much So he decides to take alicia with him as well because apparently She can also hold her own or whatever What do you have for weaponry woman john asked nodding towards alicia's black canvas bag That she had placed on the floor in front of her before she jumped in the front seat next to him I'm mama grizzly bear ready my love. She assured him I would prefer mama grizzly bear ass ready, but for now we'll go with what you got He smiled knowing his lady was way more than just a lady She was fierce in any situation that required it. No question about that.  How are you doing? Like sagal really thinks he's such a chad that he's just irresistible to women He actually believes that okay And uh, so they go to the jail and john calls his boss and asked to take haimei out And armando asks him like well, where are you gonna put him and john says, I don't know where I'm gonna put him He just can't stay in the jail and his boss agrees to it That is not how that works You you can't just take People in jail I was about to say prisoners, but that's technically a different thing But you can't just take people out of jail And take them wherever you want. That's not how that works But anyways, uh, so they're driving in the desert and then they get attacked by gunmen And the fight is described with all the passion and intensity of nutrition facts on a can of beans Four others rushed alicia's position pouring round after round as they did Alicia wasn't there though as they soon found out when she appeared out of the darkness behind them and took all four out with strafing headshots You can't claim that this book is a gritty depiction of the real world When the action feels like a bad video game like hitting multiple targets in rapid succession While also moving quickly Is so unlikely as to basically be impossible And why were they standing in a line to begin with? Like just uh, whatever whatever whatever so haime gets shot and killed during the fighting And then they call in other police to remove bodies and take statements from the couple of uh gunmen that they were able to take prisoner And armando says hey haime's death is bringing me heat from the feds Yes, yes it would because you took somebody out of the jail when you weren't supposed to and then you got them killed Like this would result in john being Fired if not arrested for getting somebody killed like he broke at least one law here And unless the police union decided that they wanted to keep cops who break the rules and get people killed around Which is likely that's what police unions are for So armando talks a little bit about how cool john and alicia are All right, doesn't doesn't really mean anything and they realize somebody is listening in on their communications And that's how people knew where they were where they were going And so they decide to be careful with that and they're going to use code words from now on They also mentioned that the cartels have more money than the mexican government Like maybe combined, but they aren't all one entity, you know, there's a bunch of different Cartels they're criminal organizations. They kill each other all the time but All right, we've already established that this doesn't take place in the real world even if it pretends to So that's the end of that chapter and then we go to another flashback chapter Chapter 14 exit strategy So we see jimmy going to see his mother and his mother's a cleaning lady at an indian casino And then he goes off with a bad guy for some nefarious purpose And that is it. That is the whole chapter. That's everything We'll go to the next chapter now because That last one wasn't needed. So let's just let's the shadow wolves are at a diner now And agent wilson is angry at john for getting his prisoner killed, which is Understandable like or actually if agent wilson was just a regular federal officer It would be understandable why he'd be mad about this, but He was trying to make sure that hymen didn't give up any information like isn't this a good thing Like if he's dead, he can't give up any information like this. This helps you wilson. Why are you so mad? and so john Threatens wilson and wilson's unimpressed I suppose that's a threat geronimo. You got me crapping in my pants. Can't you see me shaking and shitting?  I thought seagull was just a terrible actor turns out. He's using ancient chinese techniques.  Yeah, whatever whatever and besides if they had a native judge and they could Uh prove that there was clear bias demonstrated Then he could probably get off on appeals and the thing is that threat might work as an excuse It might even if it doesn't really Feel like it could happen in reality It might work as an excuse for why wilson would be intimidated and leave But then the narrator comes right out and says that wilson couldn't do anything because of political correctness Yeah, as as we all know the police never arrest minorities for any crime ever Nor do they ever harass them unnecessarily pay no attention to our pyro being found guilty of racial profiling Or how police killed american indians at a higher rate than any other racial group Plus wilson keeps calling him geronimo. So I I don't think he cares about political correctness Chapter 16 the coffee pot So john's shadow wolf mentor whose name is sunday and has also never been mentioned before And apparently he works undercover at a casino He gives him a call But also why like why would a de agent work undercover at a casino? Like I can imagine some scenarios where they might do that but the book never brings it up It's not like oh, yeah, they were we thought they might be laundering money for Cocaine traffickers like that would make sense, but they never bring it up Anyways, it's it's the casino which is attached to the hotel where maria was staying and So john goes there they search her room And this is what I mentioned before we have to watch john and sunday Investigate the murder even though we already know everything that went down So we're just sitting here going come on hurry up get get through this And the room has been cleaned which implies that the villains are professionals But they never act like professionals outside of this one scene And they also know that something is wrong not because Maria is missing and which is what would tip me off, but The spirit energy of the room is disturbed. So that's how they know what's going on All right, so john while they're searching around goes to make a cup of coffee And in the coffee machine he finds a flash drive hidden in there Yeah, he's he's the only one that likes coffee. No one else would ever search there And what why would you make coffee in this situation anyways like You're at a crime scene. You don't want to contaminate things which you might do if you're if you have food or drink there, but All right, um, I will give some small amount of credit that this was foreshadowed It's actually been mentioned multiple times before this that john really likes coffee Uh, so There you go one one point in this book's favor like they do know how to set things up before they happen awesome So sunday and john go to the surveillance room watch some security footage And they noticed some men taking maria's body out in a suitcase which Imagine if we hadn't gotten the chapter following her death and John had just shown up here and they had to look around and find her find her missing and go through the security footage and everything This investigation would actually have been a bit tense because we're a bit worried for her We're wondering like oh who killed her or why or maybe she's not dead. Maybe she was just kidnapped or like something's going on here and It It would have been a bit surprising and it would have made the character seem smart too But instead it's just repeating what we already know and i'm just sitting here thinking my god. Can we can we move on? Please somebody and then they look at the contents of the flash drive um Conveniently it just has maria reading off all the findings from the story. She's been working on You know, they don't have to dig through a ton of notes or anything else that might cause them to have to work in order to save the day but You know, they go over a bunch of stuff. We already know bad guys are bringing in terrorists to commit terrorist attacks like Again, if we hadn't already known that this might have been some sort of big reveal But we did already know that It also doesn't go over what evidence maria collected But we've established that evidence is for pussies who base their beliefs on facts and logic It's mentioned that they've been bringing in a thousand jihadis a month for seven years And they've been getting away with it because they're shielded by Judges lawyers CEOs and doctors and not sure what doctors would do in this situation And if if a thousand are coming in every month after seven years There would be 84 thousand jihadis in the united states You don't need that many people to do terrorism Like 9 11 was done with 19 hijackers They they they did that much damage with less than 20 guys Like that's the whole point of terrorism is that you have inferior manpower and inferior firepower So you're trying to do as much damage as possible with very few resources and then Even with this huge ludicrous number of people In the climax they go over all the planned attacks But they go over all the attacks and they mention like a couple dozen terrorists at most who were involved in the operation So what were the other 83 500 for and how did they keep a city's worth of people secret up until now like The soviet spy ring in the united kingdom during the cold war was Completely unraveled because one of them got drunk and started blabbing to the police And that was like 100 people like it only takes one dude to make the whole thing fall apart If you have 84,000 this would have happened a long time ago and then again Sunday explains how everyone in the government is in on the conspiracy because everyone is out to get you It's so hard being an old wealthy white man two-thirds of whom were formerly in the government themselves Or currently in the government the idea that everyone in government that you dislike is working together to destroy you is both paranoid and stupid Like, you know, you can't just think like oh, they're incompetent or oh, they I disagree with them Like no, they're they're obstacles to you being in control of all things. Therefore.  Look, you don't have to be an expert to know that the suni shia split is a thing You do have to do 30 seconds of fucking research And then in addition to those groups all working together despite hating each other They're also working with the cartels the mexican government the u.s. government the saudi government and iran and That's not all at once that comes out over the course of the book, but like all those groups are working together and I don't know possibly pakistan as well and they never bring that back up And again, these groups are all often at odds with each other if not outright hostile and killing each other Like the u.s. government and iran Yeah, those are best of friends like And again just the idea that everyone you hate is on the same side is how a child views the world Okay, reality is much more complex than that. I also dislike most of these organizations I'm not stupid enough to think that they would set aside differences And just to attack me because i'm that important Uh, and then he claim talks about how barack obama is hiding his birth certificate, which is factually untrue I'm just gonna start throwing more stuff like that out there to save time like they're gonna mention something I'm just gonna say yeah, that's factually untrue rather than going into detail about it because Sometimes that's all you can say and quite frankly I hate to sound like i'm defending barack obama because I have plenty of criticisms of my own But he was born in the united states and he was born to an american mother like if you can't accept that It's probably because You just hated having a black guy in charge Like you're trying to paint him as some nasty foreigner for that reason It'll they also imply that the cartels own the media despite the media Constantly showing cartels as being murderers, which like rightfully so Like again media is not one entity if there's a lot of things that could be considered the media and I have I can't think of a single example of cartels being portrayed sympathetically anywhere Next chapter Noach tells john that the tooth he found near the beginning of the book Belonged to a woman who is investigating government corruption Yeah, I forgot about that part too You know like if that had come up at the beginning of the book Or near the beginning of the book and they had gone. Hey, we looked into that tooth and turns out uh the woman who It belonged to she was researching government corruption and she just disappeared a couple of weeks ago like that would That that would be a good way to start things off, but they just kind of forgot about it until just now and uh And anyways a woman named sheila comes up to john and tries to have sex with him because he's just that much of a Chad and then he rebuffs her because He's in a relationship with alicia obviously and then she tries to kill him because she was secretly an assassin And that's the end of the chapter We're about halfway done Chapter 18 the jihad in the desert So this one the shadow wolves ambushed some cars in the desert They kill some bad guys. They capture some more of them and then they interrogate them I'm so glad to repeat this plot point Uh, and then john's talking to one of them and he whispers something in arabic which is uh suih bukhara, I I don't I don't know if i'm pronouncing that right.  Is this a test like Yeah, a deep cover operative who spent years pretending to be mexican Would panic when someone gives him something that sounds like a coded message Like that that's who you want working on your side plus It wouldn't make sense for this to be a test because the cops just killed several of them like what Why would you test members of your organization by killing a couple of them and then capturing the others And trying to see if they give anything up that just that's so counterproductive.  Don't they he looked from face to face for a response He was several inches shorter than john but moved like a man who knew where he was going And how to get there there are a lot of unnecessary ellipses in this book like Does steven segal think that they make everything more dramatic because They're just weird and awkward It's nice of them to reassure us that steven segal is in fact a big sorry that john is in fact a big man and anyways, basically while he's examining the weapons he um He just talks to a friend on the radio and asks him to hack into the hef database to track the weapons Which is like that's not something you can do you can't just hack into a government website like that You can't just hit control alt shift and then oh you're in like That's not how hacking works. That's never been how it works And if the bad guys if they didn't either get their weapons illegally like on the black market Or if they didn't buy them legally and then file off the serial numbers that they can't get tracked They deserve to lose because they're idiots They they don't even do like the bare minimum to prevent to cover their tracks like they're they're idiots and they deserve to lose If that's the case So john just takes all the weapons puts him in a bag and loads him up in his car for chain of custody reasons Look if you're unaware uh chain of custody is basically just protocol that law enforcement has to follow when they're Dealing with evidence of crimes Like basically it's to make sure that evidence isn't lost or tampered with like they always have to track Who has it where it is and what's done to it and if you don't turn the guns into evidence immediately like if the Crime if you don't bag it up right away, and I don't mean in like a duffel bag I mean in those special plastic bags and then you log it all if you don't already do that Then chain of custody is already broken and that evidence is inadmissible in court Now you might also be thinking that oh, okay, john just grabbed a bunch of guns and is holding on to them Maybe this is hinting that there's gonna be a fight later and he's gonna have to use all his new guns to shoot his way out of it No It never comes back up Never ever It's also revealed that john can see footprints on rocks physically and metaphorically Whatever that means, um He never uses that ability So all right And then he spends some time talking about how the mexican government is propped up by the sinaloa cartel Which is just stupid like okay, okay, which which of these makes more sense The cartel funnels money into the government to keep it functioning Or they just bribe a couple of cops and other officials to look the other way Like which of those is cheaper more effective and less likely to be discovered It's the second one. You don't you don't need to Think about that too hard, but he also says that cartels are paid by jihadis to help them cross the border And again, I already mentioned like they're killing off their own customer base.  Do you spend any time? So he decides that they can't trust anybody other than other shadow wolves So they called them in from across the country because Every indian tribe has shadow wolves Because they're all the same I guess like this is really not how that works or whatever And then the next day John goes to the jail To pick up the men that he arrested early in the book again This thing repeats more than groundhog's day so Wilson gets there right after him and he misses his prisoners and he's very upset And john gets chewed out by his boss over the phone, but he doesn't change course.   Because I know which one I would do, but I don't know. Maybe that's just me. I I want to hear from others So john offers gato some food asks him if he wants some pulled pork and gato is physically repulsed He's like I would never have pork and they catch themselves I uh, I don't like pork very much. It upsets my stomach like If you were this bad at blending in if these terrorists are this bad at blending in they would have been caught a long time ago Like this book is trying so hard to make john seems smart and he just he isn't He is not and he never has been Plus like muslims aren't allowed to eat pork But most of them aren't gonna have that kind of reaction to being offered it They're probably just going to say no thanks.  Is that a thing? I I don't know man and plus the thing is The the narrator tells us that the shadow wolves are hidden Like it just straight up says oh wilson didn't see them but they were hidden there Like so it's not any surprise to us when they pop up like if we didn't know what was going on either and wilson was just flying around going Oh, I don't see any of them Then when they pop up a minute later it would make them seem a lot cooler and a lot smarter for fooling the villain So gacho is still unsure if he's being tested for a while It takes a while But eventually he decides john is trustworthy. He reveals he's actually a double agent and he's working against the terrorists Who is he working for? It's never specified Just some foreign government. That's it. And I think it might be mexico based on that uh chapter with hosé earlier But it's never confirmed Nor is much information given so it's hard to figure out So they spend some more time fear mongering The entire white house is members of the muslim brotherhood. They give weapons to terrorists on purpose, etc Would really make more sense for the terrorists to just buy weapons once they get to the u.s But we've established there's no logic to any of this And then gacho says that the shadow wolves are the only national group of warriors that can be trusted to defend america um That feels a little weird to me because like if anything Indians have more reason to hate the u.s government than pretty much anyone else Like both for historical reasons and modern ones like Shouldn't the terrorists be trying to recruit them if anything? Like i'm not trying to imply that indians are all chomping at the bit to kill white people or anything but You could probably find a few extremists among them if you looked or hell Maybe you could just radicalize a few of them yourself if you put in the effort like that That that would make more sense here Then he spends some time Implying that isis agents are highly trained special forces And if they're old propaganda videos or anything to go off of no like even through the magic of video editing They couldn't make themselves look like the special forces badasses. They were trying to it just they failed at it And they also revealed that the terrorists like to party in the desert. We already knew that John thought for a moment and said the one thing that jumps out at me is how muslims and catholics can mix together It's not something that seems like it would go down too easily It all comes down to money The jihadists have plenty of it and the catholics who are working with them want plenty of it As long as that's a factor the whole thing works The people who are being victimized there are the peons who have to work for these tyrants But that is where the chink could develop in their armor Am i am i detecting some anti-catholic hate there? They I mean i normally wouldn't think too much about that but this book it honestly has a lot of bigotry towards several different groups so I I have to think like is that is there somebody I there's some catholic hate coming off of that, but I don't know whatever. I already went over the issues with jihadi cartel alliance It's revealed that the big cartel boss in this operation is a guy named antonio septuan And he beheads people to get his point across sometimes and then they immediately repeat That he kills people to get his point across like look I freaking marked it there. You can see it's that much space between repeating things I hate this book and then next chapter wilson agent wilson sends some men to kidnap john's mother and they just knock on the door and then this happens A few seconds later. They heard can I help you am a goat sleepily stood slightly behind a half open door The half smile on her face disappeared instantly as she took in the sight of the weapons pointed at her Oh, no, she yelled as she tried to slam the door But it was futile as they rushed through knocking her down Yeah, that's that's how humans react And john immediately knows that something is wrong because he's perfect And then they just they let gato escape But they take the other prisoners back to jail So this is half the goddamn book.  I don't even know if her name is ever said like Why should I care about her? Like if you want us to care about people that are in danger Like you kind of have to Make a side character that's likable and then have them at the casino for some reason anyways, uh, that's That's the end of that chapter. So we get to chapter 23 dead reporter talks and this is a flashback You see we just learned that jimmy warned his brother about this But this is the flashback to when jimmy warned his brother about this So we we're following jimmy warning his brother about this.  Do we have to blow that up and like Why would maloof maloof?  He's not a jihadi Like why would you one? Why would you tell him about this and two? Why would you expect him to be okay with his mother being killed? Like I don't even think most jihadis would be okay with their mother Being killed in a terrorist attack that they had something to do with. I don't think they would want to do that Uh, but then maloof forces jimmy to convert to islam and then he just kind of lets him go Like he lets him have a phone and everything and he doesn't keep him under arm guard. He just sort of lets this guy who Knows about their terrorist attack and has very good reason to want to try to stop it or warn people about it He just lets him go Makes perfect sense And then jimmy goes and calls sweet tooth and warns him So we're supposed to believe that the villains are all knowing and all powerful and everywhere But they're also just woefully incompetent like they're so strong and so weak at the same time It's it's really interesting. I swear. I've heard that somewhere before Now it's also revealed that the bomb at the casino is a dirty bomb that will spread a giant cloud of radiation all across the southwest Now at first I thought it was stupid that they were attacking such a small target Like oh, it's just some casino Like who who gives a shit about that especially compared to some of the other attacks They'll mention which are much bigger But that that makes sense now like a dirty bomb Would affect millions of people and possibly kill millions of people cause untold economic damage That's obviously secondary to the dead people But you know either way it's it would be a big deal and in fact that would probably be the biggest attack in american history The books should have just been about stopping the dirty bomb plot Like because it later mentions that there are simultaneous attacks on places like the statue of liberty the sears tower The las vegas strip the brooklyn bridge and each of these barely get a paragraph dedicated to them in total and Like it's better for stories to go deeper into events rather than wide and cover a bunch of events Like a lot of things happening is meaningless if none of them sink in and we don't care about them Also this It was his greatest achievement in life to have gotten this far so close to the heart of the great satan And now standing poised with a scepter at the ready to behead this supreme evil How are you gonna behead someone with a scepter? So john gets a call from the men who kidnapped his mother They tell him to drop the flash drive off that he got from maria's room They tell him to drop it off at the casino and his mom will go free Then he gets another call from sweet tooth Who heard from jimmy that his mom is being held in a cave because Who would ever want to watch a detective investigate anything just give him all the answers Like it's not even a gut feeling this time. Like oh, I think my mom's being held out in the desert And it's not shadow wolf powers either. It's just Here's here's the answers. Here you go. Go nuts So they gather up 38 shadow wolves from all over the country for the operation They meet up with jimmy and he leads him off to the cave and John inquires about his mom in a weird way Did she look like she was hurt john asked tersley Jimmy didn't want to be the bearer of bad news But there was no reason to lie about it to make john feel better She looks like shit, man. He thought about it for a minute and then said I don't mean no disrespect john goad and I think that your mother is a pretty lady and all But she don't look too good right now Oh, well as long as you're being polite Robert just like old tom tom Me saving your life and your hoker girl Flying up into the wind I didn't choose a good time to film this the lighting is not great So then we have another chapter And john spends the entirety of that chapter Talking about eric kahn remember the us marshal who was just so cool and amazing from earlier And he tries to convince him to help them and then kahn deputizes all the shadow wolves And I refuse to spend any more time on that Chapter 27 shadow wolves fight for america's future They came together as john explained the strategy he felt would render the best results in rescuing his mother Was this written by an ai? So they get ready to attack the cave Meanwhile maloof is preparing to do terrorist stuff and Just sigal continues to show off how much of a dumbass he is Confidence within their ranks had grown exponentially as their caliphate grew in syria and neighboring iran Due to the american retreat as they saw it iran and iraq Are two different countries steven tomas joseph They're not the same place. I get that it's one letter off. I get that they're close But they are very different countries That don't get along.   It's not supposed to be the government It is not the state It is a tool of the state when it starts acting and doing whatever it wants and acting on its own Democracy and the constitution that you claim to care about so much are already dead That doesn't just apply to presidents that you like or dislike that applies to Everybody full stop if you ever say but at any point Then you don't actually care about the republic that you claim to love so much You're just trying to gain more power for yourself And this this would be the deep state that you claim to hate so much this small Elite unelected group of people who are actively defying the will of the country That's the the deep state that you're so afraid of So after hearing that john has to convince khan that he's a true american patriot So he tells him that his mohawk ancestors fought in the american revolution The mohawk fought for the british you dense pile of lard A quantum computer running calculations for a year Could not even begin to fathom how proud these people are of their ignorance and stupidity Noche asked in his usual stoic manner. I wonder who it is that's going to clean up that mess He nodded his head towards the body strewn about him We don't have time to deal with it right now.  You're you're very you're doing a very good job at hiding like just just rent a house or something You know just rent a house In some neighborhood it can be a neighborhood out of the way certainly or just a house that's out of the way but like just Rent or buy that you certainly have the money for it and then throw your parties there Like if it's out in the middle of the desert, you're going to attract a lot more attention So, uh, it briefly cuts to bellamy about to kill john's mother. Alicia shows up and shoots him It's a good thing. We shuffled the only notable woman character away from the final battle Like the does any piece of media fail the bechdel test worse than this one Chapter 29 ghost warriors So this just starts with a description of all the planned terrorist attacks across the country Like I said, they're attacking like the sears tower or brooklyn bridge the new york stock exchange, etc and Most of them are like just you know, regular terrorist attacks.     It's real and then getting pissed off about it now That's actually this book in a nutshell not on now that i'm thinking about it And anyways, we go back to the party where Some uh middle eastern music is playing and there are women going around kissing multiple men.   I can't believe that you would put something like that in this book meant for good god-fearing christian americans, sir Think carefully next time God, I am losing my mind over this. I'm I'm just so tired. I I'm very close to the end guys. I promise I just I really want this to be over So The shadow wolves find the camp obviously because it's a big freaking beacon in the middle of the desert And uh john manages to sneak in John moved like a spirit toward and behind the prone figure who was observing a span in front of him that somehow did not include john goad Do I even uh, okay. I just i'm almost done. I'm almost done Stephen seagull got bullied a lot as a kid, didn't he? I I feel like he did but So they go in they kill all the terrorists including agent wilson and they capture maloof And he refuses to tell them where the attacks are going to happen And in order to get him to talk john throws him into a pit full of rattlesnakes to talk and Eventually he gives in in a Rather a rather interesting way Look look at what you've done.  The pain is unbelievable It's very bad Do something ali shouted We've got a lot of work to do Look guys, torture doesn't work. Okay. It only makes people tell you what they think you want to hear Okay, and I know I don't care how many movies you've seen or anything where torture works like Reality is not on your side. I hate to break it to you Like if you want information You have to interrogate it out of people and there's some very interesting psychological Uh methods that they used to do that, but like torture doesn't work It just doesn't So he tells john everything and then john Sends out all the information and then uh at some point later We reenact that scene from the beginning of the book where john is dancing with spirits in the desert And he's surrounded by men and then he hides like I guess that was an in medias res opener sort of like this whole thing was a flashback I didn't realize it until now that tends to happen when everything is exactly like everything else And when the main character does not change at all throughout the whole book And anyways, then we go to the epilogue which is only two pages It's really just a brief explanation of how all the attacks were stopped Except wait. No, most of them weren't like they stopped the dirty bomb from going off in arizona but all of the other attacks either Still happened or They happened and they were kind of mitigated.   And plus I thought barack obama was president during all of this Like that's why you kept saying the white house was full of evil muslims and stuff like Unless you're saying that his successor was actually the one behind all of this and I just misread all the stuff about His birth certificate and being half white like You It's not that difficult to keep continuity guys. It really isn't so john becomes the first american indian us marshall for arizona except. Oh wait, they call him the first native american uh us marshall for arizona And here I thought only politically correct dumbasses use the term native american And just that's that's it. That's the end I would say What a journey but honestly there was no journey in this book like some folks got shocked and then some other folks got shot And john already knows everything without having to work for it. And then he sort of saves the day without struggling Like it it doesn't even get that crazy or anything for the most part Like at least in shit like reapers creek the world and the characters change over the course of the book And like that that's what every story is when you think about it It's a tale of change like a change in the world or a change in characters or something like that And nothing changes in this. There's genuinely Nothing good here like I I cannot Think of a single plot point or a moment in the story that I liked and not even like I hate this cliche and I try not to use it But like not even in the sense of like oh that was kind of a good idea They just had a bad execution for it like nothing There's nothing here any improvements that I could make to this book would involve going back in time to prevent it from being written Uh the plot's obviously full of holes like the whole pakistanis and arabes are the same thing But then forgetting all about the pakistanis or the changing number of jihadis and Quite frankly, what were the other 84,004 like what and what happened to them? They they're all over the country like what what happened like Okay, and the world is just a reflection of the author's views on our own world and it still doesn't make any real sense like At no point during writing did they realize that something didn't add up and They didn't make any alterations because They're incapable of self-reflection like they were incapable of looking through this and realizing Oh, we're kind of contradicting ourselves and not only changing something in the book But maybe doing some introspection and realizing. Hey, you know, maybe some of my beliefs aren't Totally logical. Let's let's change it like that's something all people should do at some point But some people are incapable of it and it Accidentally lets us know exactly how insecure they are about things like their height their weight their place in society how attractive they are to women like Just all of their baggage is worn so proudly on their sleeves. It's so weird and um Moving away from story. There's not a single character that I liked anywhere here Not a single one of them has any personality any depth or any likeability whatsoever John is a big strong lawman. Alicia is his girlfriend Shadow wolves are all just John's lackeys and they're all completely interchangeable The villains are also all interchangeable mustache twirling dunces and they're only there to make the heroes look cool And with the exception of zoe redbird from house of night. John is easily easily the biggest Mary Sue I've ever seen And if he did save the day at the end and like everyone decided they love John because oh you saved Everyone in America. Everything's great. Like if that happened, he would be a bigger Mary Sue than her but it didn't so he isn't and There's just not a single Moment anywhere in here where he struggles or is wrong about anything like not one You'd think somewhere in there. They might do it by accident, but there's just nothing there Like he's just too perfect. He's a book form of most of Steven Seagal's film characters Like his ego is too fragile to ever be anything other than an unparalleled badass So even in fights his characters never get hit the bad guys just fall over in fear of them But it kind of just makes everyone involved look like a big loser The pros I mean christ like I could literally open any random page and read a paragraph from it and You would be able to see just how stupid the actual writing of this is like Calling the descriptions minimal is like calling a tornado a light breeze like I I showed you guys some of the funnier ones, but Believe me. There are so many in here Like if someone ever does an audio reading of this I will gladly listen to that because that would probably make this a lot more uh tolerable, but I don't know. I I know nothing about what anyone looks like except for john Like I guess everyone is smaller than him, uh, but that's about it And even then we don't know we don't get that much detail at what john looks like Uh, the action is like a toddler on a sugar high Trying to relay a jackie chan movie to you like I think it would take more or seek 20 minutes to describe What he thinks a punch is it's just The constant Explaining of things makes it feel like this was a fan fiction written by a 10 year old child But that child has only ever read other fan fiction written by 10 year old children the dialogue The dialogue feels like it was written by an ai trying to learn to be human like it's uncanny valley It's not quite machine, but it's not quite human either. It's it's unsettling at times. There's no spelling errors Which is honestly more than I expected after the first like five pages I was expecting to find a bunch of those spread throughout, but no, there's There's none in there, but there's still some Very odd syntax throughout which makes things hard to follow Like I had to go back and reread sentences Dozens of times throughout this like the only praise I could possibly give this thing is that it's all in English Now obviously it's full of bigotry. It's mostly towards Muslims and Arabs But there is a bit towards American Indians as well, which I talked about like oh, yes, they're they're magical. It's it's Like that's still not okay. It's a positive stereotype, I guess, but it's still you shouldn't Lump people together and judge them based off of stereotypes like that Um, I also left out that there is Some towards black people as well mostly when insulting Barack Obama and a fair amount towards latinos as well It basically says that they only join cartels because they're all stupid psychopaths and It mentions like their police and government are all obviously so corrupt because that's just what what those people are like It just it's bad and it kind of implies that the deep state is run by the jews That's a dangerous road for you to go down Steven You're half jewish, bro You might want to be careful with the types of people you associate with if those are the kinds of lines you're going to be peddling But basically all that stuff just gave me a headache and so I just left it out, you know, it's It was no fun at that point and so I was just like, okay, whatever. Let's move on and The chapter titles are pretty goddamn funny. I read some of them There's like deep state sign in the desert hot girl bad boys the cartel a good boy learns to murder Deep state shootout girls night out deep state g hottest army revealed like that just these are really terrible like There's nothing good in this book. Okay, just absolutely nothing It's it's written by people who already think they know everything and they cannot handle Any sort of criticism which makes it almost impossible to write a decent book Like you need an editor to tell you what you did wrong so that you can fix it because even the best Only get there by smoothing over the cracks that the first draft has Like what whatever your favorite author is that they wrote a first draft and then There were a lot of problems with it, but they had to smooth it over this I'm fairly certain just had the one draft and then they're like, okay, we're good. Let's Do some spell check and then we're done They created a world where all their fantasies or delusions are true, but they still couldn't make them make sense In fact out of a couple of points They accidentally make a compelling argument against most of the shit that they're trying to push in here because They just make the logical fallacies stand out more but Even if you just treat it as a pure work of fiction Even if you set aside like all the political agendas They're trying to push and the fact that Steven Seagal is very clearly Trying to insert himself in here to act like some big badass and even if you're just treating it like okay It's a thriller story.  It still doesn't work Like even absolute dog shit like true allegiance tries to have an exciting plot and relatable characters This is nothing but Holo dogma and fear like it's just pure pandering from cover to cover Like that that's all that's there. It's not even that there's a lot of pandering in there It's that this entire thing is nothing but pandering Like there's no allegory or themes to speak of any ideas that are there just right in your face lacking any subtlety or nuance whatsoever like You're allowed to do things that I disagree with certainly and That members of your audience might disagree with you're allowed to do that But if you want to change minds or have messages stick You've got to be more subtle about it and you obviously have to Be more consistent in how you apply those ideas and beliefs like That's why fern gully is thought of as preachy crap while Forest gump is a beloved film like the messages in forest gump are a bit more subtle and Even if you disagree with the messages or if you just don't understand them You can still just watch the movie and enjoy it as a movie This this book The way of the shadow wolves Is bankrupt. Okay. It is morally bankrupt artistically bankrupt Intellectually bankrupt and patriotically bankrupt Not that I'm much of a patriot myself really But these guys clearly think that they are while also hating and attacking things that form a foundation for this country That they claim to love so much like things like respect for democratic process openness to immigration equality among all people Protecting people from being abused by the government or the police Like this book takes all of those things and just shits all over them and says that they're stupid like The people who wrote this their idea of america is one where they are not only in charge of all things at all times But they are unquestioned in being in charge of all things at all times Anything less than that to them is oppression and it only happens because everyone in the world is out to get them And the thing is this doesn't even have much passion behind it Like it just feels lazy mostly because of the lack of editing, but like Usually even the crappiest books i've ever found felt like they had some passion behind it Like I I keep comparing this to the onision trilogy for pretty obvious reasons, but like I feel like greg was being passionate when he wrote those I don't think that sigal and moracy were being passionate when they wrote this So like i'm not even gonna give credit for the work that went into this since I don't think there was much work that went into this Like this is 220 pages. It is Barely novel length and it feels 20 times longer And it's not even really fun or funny beyond a few out of context lines most of which I read to you See things like the room or samurai cop are terrible movies obviously, but they're a lot of fun because Even if they're inept they have passion and energy put into them Like the passion and energy is put in the wrong places But that's what makes them fun and interesting This not only feels incompetent It feels lazy and it feels like it was written almost out of spite, but it mostly just feels lazy Like I would read true allegiance a hundred more times before I ever touch this again I I would rather never read another book in my life other than whatever onision writes than ever read this again because As much as I despise the lovely bones and I and I really do I really do hate the lovely bones if that hasn't come through by now it never will but I I can see the appeal of some of it like at the very least it felt like it was put together by professionals The only people who would genuinely claim to like this are people who are looking to have their beliefs validated Which is dumb because this is a work of fiction and it doesn't really validate anything And then there's going to be a bunch of people who Read it and hate it, but they're going to pretend to like it to like own the libs or whatever Yeah, there's I don't know. There's really nothing to say. There's there's nothing good here. And it shits the bed on basically every level.   I'm gonna say it like I I don't think I'll ever find a worse one I've said that about the lovely bones and that lasted me nine years So maybe maybe by saying this I'll have to wait until I'm 33 before I find something worse, but No, I just I just don't think I ever will and if there is then I want to stay far far away from it I I don't know what my next big review will be but Whatever it is it will honestly be a relief to get back to that and Man, this is gonna be a long one, but I hope you all have a nice day later Hey, guess what if you made it this far you are one of my best friends All the names you see here. Yeah, those are my patron names, especially the ten dollar and up guys Those are the best ones and their names are Apocavillainan, Olivia Rayan, brother Santotys, Carolina Clay, Christopher Quinton, Dan Antlisilovic I hope I got that right. 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