Patriot’s Act by Kenneth Eade Book & Legal Review

Patriot’s Act by Kenneth Eade has a unique premise and storyline, but it suffers from many writing issues. I gave it 2.5 out of 5 stars. I look forward to future books by the Kenneth Eade because writers tend to get better with the more that they write.

Patriot’s Act by Kenneth Eade: Legal Thriller Book Review

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Okay, I really hate to criticize fellow legal thriller writers, especially an indie author, but Mr. Eade needs to edit this book. Patriot’s Act is full of a lot of writing issues, so much that I have to deduct 1.5 stars from it. (The other 1 star is because the author doesn’t fully explain many of the legal premises of courtroom scenes while overexplaining the law.) On the plus side, Mr. Eade is not a bad writer grammatically-wise. He could use more descriptions (including the five senses).

• The book needs another copyedit. For example, chapters aren’t formatted correctly, and there are several line breaks in the middle of sentences.
• As I mentioned before, the book needs more descriptions. Mr. Eade goes a little overboard with the torture scenes (see below) without any impact. It reads more like a SOP manual instead.
• I don’t mind a little politics (in either direction), but this is way too much. I don’t mean that he mentions it too many times (even though he does), but that he uses it as pointless filler for his book.
• The plot does have an arc, but it’s not a good one. “Thriller” needs to have some “thrilling.” Instead, it’s mostly politically opinionated filler.
• Like the rest of the book, there are too many quotes and not enough action.
• Some character things just don’t make sense. Balls (the name of a character), for example, does not try to kill Catherine.
• Debbie, and all the scenes with Debbie in them, do not advance the story in any meaningful way.

For example, Ahmed is the POV character in chapter one, and he is describing what is happening to him as he is tortured. Ahmed then sees Sergeant Brown, one of his captors, as a hood was ripped from his head:

Standing at their side was obviously Sergeant Brown, a hefty black man with huge hands, the only one not holding a weapon. For a 25-year-old man like Brown, who was always inept in every way outside the service, power was orgasmic. He basked in it like the sun, as if he was on a white sand beach in Maui.

Brown was proud to be in United States Army, the finest military service of the greatest country in the world, a beacon for freedom, the leader of the New World Order. The Army was his life, a life that had so much more depth, meaning and importance than it did before. He was entrusted with the valuable task of shaping young men and women under his charge to destroy the enemy and wipe terrorism from the planet. The enemy was the low-life, stinking Arabs, those sand niggers, the little maggots who had strapped bombs to themselves and had blown his comrades to bits in Iraq. They were like a disease, a plague that had to be wiped out.

I hope that it’s obvious that this was not in Ahmed’s POV. It is in Sergeant Brown’s because the reader is given information that Ahmed would not be able to know, feel, or experience.

Shifting POV on a reader is, at worst, confusing. And at most, a reader can do what I do and stop reading, never to return.

My biggest issue with this book is that the author needs to learn some subtlety. He bitch-slaps you in the face with all the over-scenes. I don’t need 5 million torture scenes to understand that Ahmed is being tortured, or that the Army soldiers at Gitmo are being de-humanized by their torturers. Likewise, because Mr. Eade overemphasizes this torture, the reader becomes desensitized to it.

There isn’t much emotion, or at least the emotion isn’t well written. Even though I know Ahmed is being tortured, I don’t really feel anything for him. That’s because the author describes the torture… but he doesn’t describe the impact on the characters. For example, we desperately need a scene where Catherine opens a photo book, realizes a photo was taken by the FBI, and throws the book across the room while screaming. We need those types of scenes to connect with the character. He uses “crying” and “sobbing” to describe her so many times that the effect is like, stfu whiny woman.

However, I do feel that the author will become a better writer as he writes more books. I may take a gander at some of his later books to see if these issues were corrected … and if so, I’d suggest an editorial rewrite.

Okay, off to the book …

Book Synopsis

I’m actually going to try to make these book summaries shorter because it’s a lot of reading (and a lot of writing). So here goes.

We meet Ahmed, who was in Iraq to help out his bro. While Ahmed was overseas, he gets captured as an al Qaeda terrorist. What this means is that Ahmed has a permanent stay at Hotel Guantanamo Bay, Camp 7. We meet Brown, and the Major, who are the hoteliers at this fine torture establishment. Whoops, sorry, the military does not consider this to be torture.

We have many scene of said torture, and we get indoctrinated in the opposite political view. Mr. Eade has a thang against George W. Bush. At any rate, we meet Catherine, Ahmed’s wife.  We also meet Brent, the lawyer who will be handling this case, and Rick, Brent’s bad ass investigator.

As an aside note, we have several passages that Mr. Eade should probably clean up as they are quite offensive.

The first:

The military prison at Guantanamo was the equivalent of any concentration camp in Nazi Germany, the most shameful example of the cruel and complete abolition of all human rights by the Government, all in the name of the war on terrorism.

FYI, don’t compare this to the concentration camps. Also, the clause (“the most shameful example …”) is modifying Germany, when it should be modifying prison. So it makes the sentence sound like Nazi German was the most shameful example of all human rights by the Government.

Also, bruh, I seem to remember we had our own concentration camps during WWII. There is a difference between mass extinction of an entire people and what happened at Guantanamo. One being a crime against humanity and all. I’m not saying what happens/ed at Guantanamo wasn’t horrific. Just not the same level.

The second:

Mrs. Khury was not what Brent had expected. She was American, of obvious European descent, about 30 years old, with light brown hair and eyes. She seemed a little shy and more than a bit nervous.

“American” and “of obvious European descent” in that sentence is racist because it assumes that Americans are of European descent.

Those are minor things, but they are both fairly white-male-privilege-y.

Brent then meets Ahmed, and a bit of finagling here, Brent files a habeas corpus. A habeas is basically something an attorney files to get in front of a judge, to say that the person’s detention is unlawful.

But! The day before the habeas is granted, Ahmed is found to have killed himself. Which is B.S.

The rest of the book is pretty much one long, and boring, trial. Catherine gets $20 million for the torture of Ahmed, his death, and her Constitutional violations when the FBI searched her house and took her items … all in the name of the “war on terror.”

We do have Balls and his team of Marines, who try to do a number on Brent and Rick. Things get exciting in one chapter (imho, the only chapter) when Balls takes matters into his hands and try to strange Brent in the courtroom.

The Legal Review

Okay, I need to explain the Patriot Act since the author doesn’t do a very good job of it. Which is funny because he tends to overexplain a lot of legal jargon, but not really the concepts behind the book itself.

Also, I throw in here that the courtroom scenes were extremely dry and boring with little-to-no action or legal maneuvering, which is what I want to read in a courtroom scene.

On other words, I want Brent to out-maneuver the other side. Show some legal finesse.

What I don’t want is a line-by-line description of a trial in the same excitement as my grocery shopping list.

Most attorneys know about the Patriot Act because the cases surrounding it are required reading in Con Law in law school: Rasul v. Bush (holding that detainees had a statutory right to petition federal courts for habeas review), Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (holding that an American citizen detained in Guantanamo had a constitutional right to petition federal courts for habeas review under the Due Process Clause), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (holding that detainees were entitled to the minimal protections listed under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention), and Boumediene v. Bush (holding that Military Commissions Act of 2006, which denied habeas to detainees, was unconstitutional).

According to the DOJ, the Patriot Act:

The Department of Justice’s first priority is to prevent future terrorist attacks. Since its passage following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Patriot Act has played a key part – and often the leading role – in a number of successful operations to protect innocent Americans from the deadly plans of terrorists dedicated to destroying America and our way of life. While the results have been important, in passing the Patriot Act, Congress provided for only modest, incremental changes in the law. Congress simply took existing legal principles and retrofitted them to preserve the lives and liberty of the American people from the challenges posed by a global terrorist network.

After 9/11, Congress panicked and passed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001. This allowed the government to:

• expanded surveillance abilities of law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones;
• easier interagency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counterterrorism efforts; and
• increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges.

Among other amendments, the Patriot Act butts up against the Fourth Amendment, which is:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In short, the Patriot Act allows the government to do things like spy on its citizens and ignore the Fourth Amendment’s checks and balances. Don’t want the police to come barging into your house and take all your stuff? Too damn bad, if they “suspect” you are a terrorist. Don’t want to be dragged to Guantanamo Bay and tortured because you are a Muslim/Jewish/Korean/Latino? Too damn bad, if they “suspect” you are a terrorist.

This act was an incredible overreach of power, and the Supreme Court of the United States rightfully struck down many of its provisions. I know lots of people love the police and military, but to allow them unfettered power in the name of “justice” and “peace” and “war on terrorism” throws us back to pre-America days when we revolted against the monarchy.

My Opinion

Not a knock-’em-out-of-the-park legal thriller, but a good first one. A thorough rewrite (and hiring a good editor) will do the trick. However, the book needs a bit more action and little less white privilege.

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