Books by Bracken, Matthew
- Bracken, Matthew.
Castigo Cay.
Orange Park, FL: Steelcutter Publishing, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-9728310-4-8.
-
Dan Kilmer wasn't cut out to be a college man. Disappointing
his father, after high school he enlisted in the Marine Corps,
becoming a sniper who, in multiple tours in the sandbox, had
sent numerous murderous miscreants to their reward. Upon
leaving the service, he found that the skills he had acquired
had little value in the civilian world. After a disastrous
semester trying to adjust to college life, he went to work
for his rich uncle, who had retired and was refurbishing a
sixty foot steel hulled schooner with a dream of cruising the
world and escaping the deteriorating economy and increasing
tyranny of the United States. Fate intervened, and after
his uncle's death Dan found himself owner and skipper of
the now seaworthy craft.
Some time later, Kilmer is cruising the Caribbean with his
Venezuelan girlfriend Cori Vargas and crew members Tran Hung
and Victor Aleman. The schooner Rebel Yell is
hauled out for scraping off barnacles while waiting for a
treasure hunting gig which Kilmer fears may not come off,
leaving him desperately short of funds. Cori desperately
wants to get to Miami, where she believes she can turn her looks
and charm into a broadcast career. Impatient, she jumps
ship and departs on the mega-yacht Topaz, owned
by shadowy green energy crony capitalist Richard Prechter.
After her departure, another yatero
informs Dan that Prechter has a dark reputation and that there
are rumours of other women who boarded his yacht disappearing
under suspicious circumstances. Kilmer made a solemn promise
to Cori's father that he would protect her, and he takes his
promises very seriously, so he undertakes to track Prechter to
a decadent and totalitarian Florida, and then pursue him to
Castigo Cay in the Bahamas where a horrible fate awaits Cori.
Kilmer, captured in a desperate rescue attempt, has little
other than his wits to confront Prechter and his armed
crew as time runs out for Cori and another woman abducted by
Prechter.
While set in a future in which the United States has continued
to spiral down into a third world stratified authoritarian
state, this is not a “big picture” tale like
the author's Enemies trilogy
(1, 2, 3). Instead,
it is a story related in close-up, told in the first person,
by an honourable and resourceful protagonist with few
material resources pitted against the kind of depraved sociopath
who flourishes as states devolve into looting and enslavement
of their people.
This is a thriller that works, and the description of the
culture shock that awaits one who left the U.S. when it
was still semi-free and returns, even covertly, today
will resonate with those who got out while they could.
Extended
excerpts
of this and the author's other novels are available online at the
author's Web site.
February 2014 
- Bracken, Matthew.
Domestic Enemies.
Orange Park, FL: Steelcutter Publishing, 2006.
ISBN 978-0-9728310-2-4.
-
This is the second novel in the author's “Enemies”
trilogy, which began with
Enemies Foreign and Domestic (EFAD)
(December 2009). In
After America (August 2011)
Mark Steyn argues that if present trends continue (and
that's the way to bet), within the lives of those
now entering the workforce in the United States (or, at least
attempting to do so, given the parlous state of the economy)
what their parents called the “American dream”
will have been extinguished and turned into a nightmare along
the lines of Latin American authoritarian states: bifurcation of
the society into a small, wealthy élite within their
walled and gated communities and impoverished masses living
in squalor and gang-ruled “no go” zones where
civil society has collapsed.
This book picks up the story six years after the conclusion of
EFAD. Ranya Bardiwell has foolishly attempted to return to the
United States and been apprehended and sent to a detention and
labour camp, her son taken from her at birth. When she manages
to escape from the camp, she tracks down her son as having been
given for adoption to the family of an FBI agent in New Mexico,
and following the trail she becomes embroiled in the seething
political storm of Nuevo Mexico,
where separatist forces have taken power and seized upon the
weakness of the Washington regime to advance their agenda of
rolling back the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
and creating a nation of
“Aztlan”
from the territories ceded by Mexico in that treaty.
As the story progresses, we see the endpoint of the
reconquista in
New Mexico, Los Angeles, and San Diego, and how
opportunistic players on all sides seek to exploit
the chaos and plunder the dwindling wealth of the dying
empire for themselves. I'm not going to get into the
plot or characters because almost anything I say would
be a spoiler and this story does not deserve to be
spoilt—it should be savoured. I consider it
to be completely plausible—in the aftermath
of a financial collapse and breakdown of central authority,
the consequences of mass illegal immigration, “diversity”,
and “multiculturalism” could, and indeed will
likely lead to the kind of outcome sketched here. I found only
one technical quibble in the entire novel (a turbine-powered
plane “coughing and belching before catching”),
but that's just worth a chuckle and doesn't detract in any
way from the story. This the first thriller I recall reading
in which a precocious five year old plays a central part in
the story in a perfectly believable way, and told from his
own perspective.
This book is perfectly accessible if read stand-alone, but I strongly
recommend reading EFAD first—it not only
sets the stage for the mid-collapse America in which this
story plays out, but also provides the back story for Ranya
Bardiwell and Bob Bullard who figure so prominently here.
Extended
excerpts
of this and the author's other novels are available online at the
author's Web site.
March 2012 
- Bracken, Matthew.
Enemies Foreign and Domestic.
Orange Park, FL: Steelcutter Publishing, [2003] 2008.
ISBN 978-0-9728310-1-7.
-
This is one of those books, like John Ross's
Unintended Consequences
and Vince Flynn's
Term Limits in which a
long
train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably
the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under
absolute Despotism committed by the Federal Government
of the United States finally pushes liberty-loving citizens
to exercise
“their right, … their duty, to throw off such
Government” even if doing so requires
the tree
of liberty to be refreshed “with the blood of
patriots and tyrants”.
In this novel a massacre at a football stadium which occurs
under highly dubious circumstances serves as the pretext
for a draconian ban on semiautomatic weapons, with immediate
confiscation and harsh penalties for non-compliance. This
is a step too far for a diverse collection of individuals
who believe the Second Amendment to be the ultimate bastion
against tyranny, and a government which abridges it to be
illegitimate by that very act. Individually, they begin
to take action, and what amounts to a low grade civil war
begins to break out in the Tidewater region of Virgina,
with government provocateurs from a rogue federal agency
of jackbooted thugs (as opposed to the jackbooted
thugs of other agencies which are “just following
orders”) perpetrating their own atrocities, which
are then used to justify even more restrictions on the
individual right to bear arms, including a ban on telescopic
sights (dubbed “sniper rifles”), transportation
of weapons in automobiles, and random vehicle stop checkpoints
searching for and confiscating firearms.
As the situation spirals increasingly out of control,
entrepreneurial jackbooted thugs exploit it to gain
power and funding for themselves, and the individuals
resisting them come into contact with one another and
begin to put the pieces together and understand who is
responsible and why a federal law enforcement agency is
committing domestic terrorism. Then it's payback time.
This novel is just superbly written. It contains a wealth of
detail, all of it carefully researched and accurate. I only
noted a couple of typos and factual goofs. The characters are
complex, realistically flawed, and develop as the story unfolds.
This is a thriller, not a political tract, and it will keep you
turning the pages until the very end, while thinking about
what you would do when liberty is on the line.
Excerpts
from the book are available online at the
author's Web site.
December 2009 
- Bracken, Matthew.
Foreign Enemies and Traitors.
Orange Park, FL: Steelcutter Publishing, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-9728310-3-1.
-
This is the third novel in the author's “Enemies”
trilogy, which began with
Enemies Foreign and Domestic
(December 2009), and continued with
Domestic Enemies
(March 2012). Here, we pick up the story three years
after the conclusion of the second volume. Phil Carson, who
we last encountered escaping from the tottering U.S. on a sailboat
after his involvement in a low-intensity civil war in Virginia,
is returning to the ambiguously independent Republic of Texas,
smuggling contraband no longer available in the de-industrialised
and bankrupt former superpower, when he is caught in a freak
December hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico and shipwrecked
on the coast of Mississippi.
This is not the America he left. The South is effectively under
martial law, administered by General Marcus Aurelius Mirabeau; east Texas
has declared its independence;
the Southwest has split off as Aztlan and secured autonomy in
the new Constitution; the East and upper Midwest remain under the
control of the ever more obviously socialist regime in Washington;
and the
American redoubt
states in the inland northwest are the
last vestige of liberty. The former United States have not only
been devastated by economic collapse and civil strife
stemming from the attempt to ban and confiscate weapons, but
then ravaged by three disastrous hurricanes and two earthquakes
on the
New Madrid
fault. It's as if God had turned his back on the United States of
America—say “no” to Him three times, and
that may happen.
Carson, a Vietnam special forces veteran,
uses his skills at survival, evasion, and escape, as well as
his native cunning, to escape (albeit very painfully) to
Tennessee, which is in the midst of a civil war. Residents,
rejecting attempts to disarm them (which would place them at
risk of annihilation at the hands of the “golden horde”
escaping devastated urban areas and ravaging everything in their
path), are now confronted with foreign mercenaries from such
exemplars of human rights and rule of law as Kazakhstan and
Nigeria, brought in because U.S. troops have been found too
squeamish when it come to firing on their compatriots:
Kazakhstani cavalry—not so much. (In the book, these
savages are referred to as “Kazaks”.
“Kazakhstani” is correct, but as an abbreviation
I think “Kazakh” [the name of their language] would
be better.)
Carson, and the insurgents with whom he makes contact in
Tennessee, come across incontrovertible evidence of an
atrocity committed by Kazakhstani mercenaries, at the direction
of the highest levels of what remains of the U.S. government.
In a world with the media under the thumb of the regime and
the free Internet a thing of the past, getting this information
out requires the boldest of initiatives, and recruiting
not just career NCOs, the backbone of the military, but also
senior officers with the access to carry out the mission.
After finishing this book, you may lose some sleep pondering
the question, “At what point is a military coup the best
achievable outcome?”.
This is a thoroughly satisfying conclusion to the “Enemies”
trilogy. Unlike the previous volumes, there are a number of lengthy
passages, usually couched as one character filling in another
about events of which they were unaware, which sketch the
back story. These are nowhere near as long as Galt's speech in
Atlas Shrugged (April 2010),
(which didn't bother me in the least—I thought it
brilliant all of the three times I've read it), but they do
ask the reader to kick back from the action and review how we
got here and what was happening offstage. Despite the effort
to make this book work as a stand-alone novel, I'd recommend
reading the trilogy in series—if you don't you'll miss the
interactions between the characters, how they came to be here,
and why the fate of the odious Bob Bullard is more than justified.
Extended
excerpts
of this and the author's other novels are available online at the
author's Web site.
September 2012 
- Bracken, Matthew.
The Red Cliffs of Zerhoun.
Orange Park, FL: Steelcutter Publishing, 2017.
ISBN 978-0-9728310-5-5.
-
We first met Dan Kilmer in
Castigo Cay (February 2014),
where the retired U.S. Marine sniper (I tread cautiously
on the terminology: some members of the Corps say there's
no such thing as a “former Marine” and, perhaps,
neither is there a “former sniper”) had to
rescue his girlfriend from villains in the Caribbean. The
novel is set in a world where the U.S. is deteriorating
into chaos and the malevolent forces suppressed by
civilisation have begun to assert their power on the high seas.
As this novel begins, things have progressed, and not for the
better. The United States has fractured into warring provinces
as described in the author's “Enemies” trilogy.
Japan and China are in wreckage after the global economic
crash. Much of Europe is embroiled in civil wars between the
indigenous population and inbred medieval barbarian
invaders imported by well-meaning politicians or allowed to
land upon their shores or surge across their borders by the
millions. The reaction to this varies widely depending upon
the culture and history of the countries invaded. Only those
wise enough to have said “no” in time have
been spared.
But even they are not immune to predation. The plague of Islamic
pirates on the high seas and slave raiders plundering the
coasts of Europe was brought to an end only by the navies of
Christendom putting down the corsairs' primitive fleets. But with
Europe having collapsed economically, drawn down its defence
capability to almost nothing, and daring not even to speak the
word “Christendom” for fear of offending its
savage invaders, the pirates are again in ascendence,
this time flying the black flag of jihad instead of the Jolly
Roger.
When seventy young girls are kidnapped into sex slavery from a
girls' school in Ireland by Islamic pirates and offered for
auction to the highest bidder among their co-religionists,
a group of those kind of hard men who say things like
“This will not stand”, including a retired British
SAS colonel and a former Provisional IRA combatant (are
either ever “retired” or “former”?)
join forces, not to deploy a military-grade fully-automatic hashtag, but to
get the girls back by whatever means are required.
Due to exigent circumstances, Dan Kilmer's 18 metre steel-hulled
schooner, moored in a small port in western Ireland to peddle
diesel fuel he's smuggled in from a cache in Greenland, becomes
one of those means. Kilmer thinks the rescue plan to be
folly, but agrees to transport the assault team to their
rendezvous point in return for payment for him and his crew
in gold.
It's said that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
In this case, the plan doesn't even get close to that point.
Improvisation, leaders emerging in the midst of crisis,
and people rising to the occasion dominate the story.
There are heroes, but not superheroes—instead people
who do what is required in the circumstances in which they
find themselves. It is an inspiring story.
This book has an average review rating of 4.9 on Amazon, but
you're probably hearing of it here for the first time. Why?
Because it presents an accurate view of the centuries-old
history of Islamic slave raiding and trading, and the reality
that the only way this predation upon civilisation can be
suppressed is by civilised people putting it down in with
violence commensurate to its assault upon what we hold most
precious.
The author's command of weapons and tactics is encyclopedic,
and the novel is consequently not just thrilling but
authentic. And, dare I say, inspiring.
The Kindle edition is free for Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
January 2018 