"Mecca" by Susan Straight (2022)

"Sergeant Michael Miller Sr. hated us all.  'Inland Empire assholes - don't you guys have brain damage from birth?  Wait, Frias is from the OC.  How the hell is he the best shot at the range?'"

Susan Straight is an American novelist who also teaches Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.  To date she's had nine novels published, of which Mecca is her most recent.

Mecca opens with Johnny Frias, a California highway patrolman with a dark secret.  From Johnny the novel moves on to a cast of largely Mexican-American (or Hispanic American) characters trying to survive in southern California, some of them there legally, and some of them on the lookout for ICE.  Towards the end of the novel COVID intervenes, and on the heels of COVID there's an uptick in immigration raids leading to a standoff on a reservation in the California desert.

It's a good book, even if it doesn't quite come together in the end.  The characters are for the most part convincing, although some of the male characters seem unnecessarily macho at times.  It's no easy thing to (literally) break someone's face, and that part of the book could have used both more buildup and more explanation beforehand.

As you might imagine, this novel also checks off a lot of diversity boxes.  Character who's a single mother?  Check.  Character who's a black single mother?  Check.  Character who's a black Hispanic Native American single mother?  Also check.  Mecca doesn't go out of its way to include gay, trans or handicapped characters, but in all other respects it's guaranteed to infuriate your average Trump supporter.

I'm hoping that the author only happened to check off all those diversity boxes, and that the presence of so many ethnicities isn't just pandering.  I don't think that it is.  At least I hope it's not.

I do have one serious complaint about Mecca, however, and this complaint is that some of the antagonists are very one dimensional.  I think that delving into the personalities and motivations of the police sergeant, the rich benefactress and at least one of those evil ICE agents would have made this book much stronger. 

This said, the first 3/4 of this book is excellent.  The remaining 1/4?  It wasn't the heart-rending climax I was hoping for.

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