Review: Rubins weave Louisiana imagery into third unsettling thriller

The third of Michael and Ayan Rubin’s Louisiana thrillers debuted last month, published by the University of Louisiana Press.

Titled “A White Hot Plan,” it tells the story of a once distinguished, but now disgraced, former New Orleans police detective who slowly realizes that the south Louisiana parish where he now works as a lowly deputy is a center of major national and international crime.

Drug smuggling along the coast and marshes of south Louisiana is intertwined with the ambitious and destructive plans of a paramilitary white supremacy organization. Though the group’s headquarters are in Idaho, its powerful tentacles reach all over the country, including Petit Rouge Parish, the territory the protagonist, Starner, is trying to police. All of these evil forces are not only permitted by, but allied with, a dictatorial sheriff who cultivates the image of intrepid crime-fighter.

The earlier chapters of the novel, in which the numerous characters and plots are taking shape, are replete with the south Louisiana atmospheric imagery employed by the Rubins in their previous work, including “The Cottoncrest Curse,” their debut novel. As in their second work, “Cashed Out,” the main character in “A White Hot Plan” has a connection with someone in the previous novel, thus establishing the books as a series, though no common major character ties them together..

In the later chapters, the pace quickens as a diabolical scheme unfolds in which the plan of the Precept, head of the militia, manages to have his converts assemble and transport enough explosives to blow up the entire French Quarter. Did he succeed? You’ll have to read the book.

We do know, though, that the recruit chosen to be the suicide bomber has totally surrendered to the Precept’s overarching concept of the superiority of white Aryan Christians. He constantly reminds himself that it is God’s will that he die in destroying the degenerates of New Orleans, along with others who are on the militia’s hate list — “blacks, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and anyone else who did not worship a white Jesus.” The Precept’s goal, in addition, is to demonstrate his power by staging the greatest terrorist act of destruction yet performed in the United States.