THE RISING ORDER

A woman survives a mass shooting only to find herself forced to participate in a terrorist plot in Isenthal’s thriller debut.

An abandoned, alienated, hate-filled delinquent has a chance encounter with Flynn, a pretty waitress, who becomes the first person to ever show him kindness and respect. Ten years later, Flynn is a recruiter for the prominent Chicago-based telecommunications and technology giant Magnetic. Despite her successful and attractive exterior, Flynn empathizes with outcasts and misfits while remaining aloof to the starchy corporate organization men who insistently hit on her. Forced into an outing at Wrigley Field with co-workers, Flynn is caught in a horrific mass shooting and paramilitary attack by REDS, a vast underground conspiracy of mass murdering Nietzschean fanatics dedicated to the fall of society. (REDS is not depicted as absurdist or funny, though the group is amusingly untraceable by law enforcement.) Flynn is about to be killed by a REDS gunman when the shooter recognizes her—he is the same angry lad from 10 years earlier, taken in and groomed by REDS and renamed Wolf. Instantly smitten, Wolf violates REDS protocols and abducts Flynn, convincing his superiors that the traumatized woman must be kept alive as an asset to get Wolf hired by Magnetic and enable him to wreak epic havoc from within. The author consulted with experts on hate groups and extremism, and there are many dialogues between the virtuous heroine and her terrorist admirer about the ethics and merits of their separate worldviews (“Wake up, Flynn. You can’t solve this by sitting around in a circle holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya.’ It’s about time you come to terms with the fact that at the core, everyone is the same. They’re all selfish assholes”). The body count escalates beyond what readers may expect, and the politically inclined may be frustrated by the fact that REDS is not defined explicitly as either right-wing or left-wing, but that ambiguity may be explored in a future book, as a cliffhanger ending leaves things wide open for a sequel.

A woman-in-peril page-turner that ambitiously explores the opposing philosophies of the characters.