[leebase]

A quick read legal (Navy JAG) thriller. Not exactly up to Grisham or Clancy standards but genuinely entertaining. Radical Islamic terrorists hatch a plan to infiltrate the US Navy using clerics as chaplains to recruit and radicalize muslim sailors. The book was published in 2005 a few years after 911 but before some of the other incidents that make the scenario all the more plausible.

The book has all the elements of a good legal thriller....interesting bright and competitive characters. There's love interests and politics and the like. I'd give the book a solid 'B'.

HOWEVER -- the book is "Christian fiction". Just like regular fiction only with more overtly Christian characters who pray and try to grow closer to God. I didn't know this before reading the book and only kind of wondered about it until I got to the end and saw that it was published by Zondervan....publishers of the very bible I read (the NIV) among others. Ok....so this is truly an overtly Christian book. No problem, just know that going in.

BUUUUT -- now you gotta cringe with the Muslim villians and the money grubbing jewish lawyer they hired to defend them. A Jew willing to do defend anyone for money. Ouch! It's not that these are unbelievable characters....there's just no balancing Jewish or Muslim characters in the book. Gotta give Don Brown a D- for that. It's MUCH WORSE for a Christian book, IMHO, to be so poor in handling the Jewish and Muslim faith.

Lee