I am reading a book at the moment called "the girl in the glass box" by James Grippando. I have read some of James Grippando's books before and they seemed to be quite good so I got this one from the library last week. It is a new one, dated 2019, and all his books are set in Florida, the Bahama islands or around that area. He always talks about the X Cuban population in Miami and other nationalities have "bit parts". However, now this book seems to be a work specifically designed to drum up support for illegal immigrants from every South American country, every Island in the vicinity and African countries just for good measure.
It is an over emotional story of woman and her teenage daughter who "escaped" poverty and gang violence in El Salvador, and "drips poignancy from every page". They are living happily in a wonderful melting pot of multiculturalism in Miami only for the mother to be "tackled to the ground" and handcuffed by an ICE officer who is built like a linebacker just as she is about to reach her front door to warn her daughter that 'ICE are coming", then she is taken (while bleeding) to a detention centre some hours away, which the author takes great pains to point out, is just like a prison. The daughter escapes detention by the evil "ICE" because she knows the law and knows that ICE officers can not come into the house of an "undocumented immigrant" without a warrant if the door is shut (they even sit in a van outside her house waiting for her to come out, for 5 hours but finally give up).
I've only got up to page 87 so far but I think the rest of the book is about her teenage daughter's valiant struggle to get a lawyer and free her mother.
When did so many books from America go through to the rest of the world, criticising American policy? It seems weird. Books aren't supposed to be telling the world "how awful is the Whitehouse and the American government", they're supposed to be telling us the opposite. When I came to "Jack had officially heard everything: A legal argument based on Whitehouse policy ………… which meant that the attorney general could direct immigration judges on how to interpret the law, and if the attorney general didn't like that interpretation, he could fire them" I thought "am I reading a novel or an editorial from the Washington Post?
I'm sure that pre-2017 (or so) books weren't like this. Dang, another of my favourite authors "gone over to the dark side".
Can anyone recommend any good books that could be described as "political thrillers" that have a "freedom" theme? (Ok, maybe "political thriller" and "freedom" is an oxymoron, so how about a political or legal thriller by someone who is not suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome"?)
Are there any authors left who haven't been bitten by the "Trump derangement syndrome" bug?