Milwaukee Jihad
Editor’s Note: This is Matt Flynn’s first novel in the new series of spy thrillers starring a brilliant mathematician and lots of Yale connections. (See our reviews of the prior two books here.)
This one skewers the Wisconsin political elite, which Matt knows well from his stint as Chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and his unsuccessful runs for Governor and Congress. See Matt’s 2018 Notes from the Political Front post.
Jihadist forces in the Middle East tangle with covert figures in the American government. ISIS and its collaborators in Saudi Arabia plan to attack the U.S. Capitol during the State of the Union speech and destroy the Capitol and everyone inside with a combination of suicide bombers and a fleet of small suicide planes. They have embedded assassins in some U.S. cities in advance of the attack. ISIS communicates through a system of quantum cryptography that the U.S. can’t decipher.
Bernie Weber, a brilliant doctoral student, is put to work to break their code. The CIA assigns agent Audrey Knapp to protect him. The assassins are picked off one by one as Knapp and stubborn Milwaukee fight back. When the President and the First Lady start their limousine ride to the Capitol for the Speech, a team of Navy Seals, Navy planes, and Audrey Knapp with a knife in the Visitor Gallery try to stop the final attack.
This edgy and sometimes darkly comic clash of cultures is riddled with violence, politics and mathematical science as it twists and turns like a relentless chess match, with the fate of Democracy in the balance.