Ordinary Targets

In the semiquincentennial year, America is ready to celebrate itself.Banners hang from school doors. Civic committees prepare speeches. Children make paper stars and write sentences about home. Across the country, the machinery of public memory is already in motion.Then the attacks begin.Not only spectacular attacks against crowds and infrastructure, but smaller strikes against the ordinary places where a nation learns to trust itself: bus routes, church doors, libraries, pantries, summer programs, neighborhood gatherings, and family routines. The targets are ordinary because ordinary life is where civilization actually lives.But death is not the only purpose.As the violence spreads, so do the explanations. Planted evidence, false witnesses, contradictory rumors, and instant certainty move faster than facts. Parents, pastors, police, soldiers, officials, and families under strain find themselves pulled into a campaign designed not merely to frighten Americans, but to make them accuse, sort, harden, and turn on one another before truth can arrive.In Dallas, a mother tries to protect her child without surrendering the meaning of home. A police lieutenant fights institutional hunger for false certainty. A systems analyst begins to see the shape of the campaign. A priest keeps his church open when fear wants every door managed. A Guardsman learns that sometimes the most faithful act is not to advance. And one broken participant in the machinery of violence discovers, too late and not cleanly, that usefulness to evil is not the same as belonging.Set against the uneasy celebrations of the American semiquincentennial, Ordinary Targets is a tense literary thriller about terrorism, public fear, manipulated meaning, and the fragile line between protection and panic. It is a novel about what happens when a country is tempted to see enemies everywhere-and about the ordinary people who must fulfill their vocations when the nation's survival depends not on spectacle, but on refusal.The violence is real. The danger is real. The test is whether America will become what fear demands.And somewhere, in a child's hand, a paper star still says: America is still our home.

Pagina's: 542, Paperback, Independently published