A Line in the Sand is a 2023 novel by Kevin Powers, National Book Award finalist for The Yellow Birds. While that debut novel was clearly a literary work to which award judges show a decided propensity, this book is more likely to be found in airport bookstores in the thriller or murder mystery section. The story begins with all the hallmarks of the genre: the discovery of a dead body by a man with shadowy past who lost his wife and child under highly questionable circumstances years before. The murder of the mystery man is investigated by a detective team comprised of a hard-edged veteran cop and her more inexperienced partner. Meanwhile, a hard-drinking journalist sees the evolving story as her last shot to avoid burning out and being fired. The man with the past who found the dead body worked as an interpreter for American soldiers fighting in Iraq. At one point during the war, the interpreter recorded video on his cell phone of a massacre and following the tragic attack on his family he was able to make it to America and set up a simple life working at a motel. The story depends far more heavily on dialogue than the author’s more literary first novel and, according to the custom of the genre, is terse and hardboiled.
Rather than being a simple and direct murder mystery, however, the book shows ambitions to pay homage to Raymond Chandler as solving the murder becomes just a piece of a much larger conspiratorial background story. The investigations by the police and the journalist eventually lead to the corruption of The Decision Tree Company, war profiteers engaging unregulated mercenaries who turn out to be the soldiers that committed the massacre. Somewhat over-optimistically, the investigations ultimately lead to accountability. That secret recording of the massacre goes missing as the shadow of the Decision Tree Company’s power looms larger and larger.
Constructed on the foundation of a murder mystery, the real interest of the narrative is much more political in scope. Written by a former soldier who actually did serve in Iraq, all the myriad elements related to the murder investigation all come together to form a corrosive critique of the intensifying trend in America toward privatizing war. The Decision Tree Company is a fictional stand-in for notorious real-life company Blackwater which was instrumental in introducing private mercenaries—labeled with the less explosive term “contractors”—into the officially sanctioned U.S. war against Iraq and Afghanistan.
The novel personalizes the story of the interpreter who is forced to flee his homeland because he can no longer trust either his American employers or the enemy against which they are fighting. His story becomes a symbol of the way in which the introduction of privatization into the business of war between nations creates an added dimension of distrust. While historically the battle between two opposing nations has been built upon the back of nationalism and patriotism, the new paradigm has introduced a profit motive into the reality of war. And as with everything else, when there are huge profits to be made, the longer that revenue source can be maintained, the greater the benefit.
The book is ultimately suggesting a critique of privatizing war that suggests just as endless sequels can keep the profits of a movie franchise coming in, so can endless conflicts keep a war going on well past any national security necessity. By setting the novel in a period in which the Bush administration’s handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was handed over to the Obama administration with no significant change in execution, the story insists that the business of war has moved beyond the control or interest of political factions. Modern warfare has genuinely become a business designed at least as much to produce profit as to further political interests.
