The Quiet War

I must confess by this point I read The Quiet War just because I wanted to see just how far down Mark Hewitt’s Duncan Hunter series could go. Two chapters in, I was not disappointed. We get a padded flashback chapter where every single technical name is spelled out in full like it was a late Gold Eagle book, and then an example of the gargantuan homophobia the series became infamous for. And another. And another. The “flashback” chapters reach double digits, treating us to such horrors from the main character’s perspective as The Beatles.

This is not a book about a super-plane, even though there’s a chapter where it effortlessly crushes its opposition (like it has always done in the series). This is a book about gay communists. This sounds like some online insult, but it’s actually the factual book subject matter (besides said squash and a past article about the main character finding a treasure chest.) Tirades about how a cabal of gay communists were steered by the USSR into sabotaging America make up most of this. And the previous book. And…

So this isn’t even amusingly bad. It’s just on repeat.

I recently finished Infiltrated, the latest (as of this post) entry in the Duncan Hunter series by Mark Hewitt. I was extremely relieved to be done with it, having gone ahead with the final two books out of plain curiosity. It probably was not the wisest decision out there.

By now the main character is an internet Navy SEAL meme done unironically. The set pieces are reduced to the same old superplane gimmick that’s already been repeated many times over. But those are small problems compared to the absolute biggest sign of devolution: The series has become more than ever like William W. Johnstone.

Like Johnstone, the final two books have been taken over more and more by repetitive political rants. They reach a particular low in Infiltrated, not helped by a change in tone. The conspiracies go from “The Hindenburg was destroyed by communists and Amelia Earhart kidnapped by a Soviet submarine and sold into slavery in the Middle East” to boring, annoying, and slightly creepy internet conspiracy theories turned real. It’s like going from “Actually, JFK was killed by a combination of Jackie and the car’s driver” to someone going on tirade after tirade on the “international bankers”.

So yeah, I’m glad to be finished. It was a fun ride for a few books, but overstayed its welcome without a good stopping point.