Weekly Reader: A White Hot Plan by Mike and Ayan Rubin; Suspenseful Tense Thriller About Hate Groups and Domestic Terrorism

 Weekly Reader: A White Hot Plan by Mike and Ayan Rubin; Suspenseful Tense Thriller About Hate Groups and Domestic Terrorism

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Despite what Right Wing Media would like to say, domestic terrorism based on white supremacy is still very much alive and well. The hate crime shooting in Jacksonville, Florida is one such example and is only the most current. In 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified 1,225 hate and anti-government extremist groups, 109 of them are white supremacist, in the United States. The groups and individuals that focus around former President Donald Trump, argue against his indictments, and create conspiracy theories that paint Trump as some sort of innocent victim or a Messiah for their delusional religion have made these hate groups more noticeable and willing to come forward. The presence of social media has also allowed members to come out from behind the fringes, their white robes and hoods, and secret codes and meetings to display their hatred openly. Hate groups never disappeared. They are just now upfront and mainstream.

So yes with that environment, it is easy to see why a psychological thriller like Mike and Ayan Rubin's A White Hot Plan would be so timely.

Starner Gautreaux has just been reassigned from his position as a police officer in New Orleans to become a deputy in tiny Petit Rouge Parish, his old hometown. He expects the job to be mostly writing tickets and pulling over drunk teens. Not like solving murders and stopping gang fights of his past. 

Starner's boredom is about to come to an end when he pulls a dead man away from his exploding tractor-trailer. Another man gets shot in the head at his used vehicle parts store. A school bus driver is poisoned by gas. 

It doesn't take long for Starner to realize that these murders are related. While Starner and his colleagues are working at solving these murders, a White Supremacist group has plans for a future terrorist attack, one that will make the news and that no one will ever forget.

Starner is a good lead for a book such as this. He is very reminiscent of Jarod Huntington, protagonist of Lee Allan Howard’s recent thriller, The Covenant Sacrifice. Both left their rural communities behind for the big city only to return and face the prejudices that they thought were left behind. 

In Jarod’s case, he is a gay man returning to a town whose residents appease a supernatural demon by sacrificing an LGBT person. The sexuality theme is more of a subtext underneath the supernatural front. In the case of A White Hot Plan the prejudice is front and center. Monsters and demons are unnecessary when human villains operate on their own prejudices, biases, and hatreds. 

Starner knows the racism that surrounds him and that investigating these murders will be an uphill battle. He knows that even though Petit Rouge Parish has plenty of residents, both black and white, that many neighbors still hate one another because of their skin color and some are willing to put that hatred to violence even if it is against someone that they have known their whole lives. 

This is the type of thriller where we get the protagonist and antagonist’s perspective so we get inside the mind of the hate group members, in particular its leader who goes by the name of Precept and Kenny, a newcomer who is slowly climbing the ranks. We see their aliases, so no one knows anyone’s real name. We see their secret codes, messages, and signs of recognition so they know who is part of the group and is privy to their plans. 

Thankfully, A White Hot Plan takes the perspective from the antagonists, but they are not portrayed sympathetically. We might understand why they joined such a racist group and how the thought of white supremacy acts like a poison that corrodes the soul and destroys whatever reason that they might have. But they are fanatic, cruel, delusional, and so driven by their hatred that some are willing to die for it and if this plan comes to fruition, they just might. 

This process of capturing the protagonist and antagonists’ points of view puts  the Reader ahead of the law enforcement but only up to a point. We know who they are. We know who they killed. We know why they are doing it. What we don’t know until the very end is what is their final objective and how they are planning on achieving it. When their final plan is set, it is every bit as chilling and gripping as the build up predicted. It is definitely a tense several chapters long event that propels the narrative into a tense chase between Starner and the white supremacists. 

A White Hot Plan is definitely suspenseful and thrilling. The most frightening part is in a highly toxic divisive world where the very definition of racism is challenged and many won’t even permit it to be talked about, this fictional scenario could very easily become fact.