Description
Book SynopsisOn April 19, 1995, a truck bomb exploded just outside of Oklahoma City''s Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people. Within a matter of hours, the FBI launched the largest manhunt in U.S. history, identifying the suspects as Timothy James McVeigh and John Doe No. 2, a stocky twentysomething with a distinctive tattoo on his left arm. Eventually the FBI retracted the elusive mystery man as a bombing suspect altogether, proclaiming that McVeigh had acted alone and that John Doe No. 2 was the byproduct of unreliable eyewitness testimony in the wake of the attack. Womack recreates the events that led up to this fateful day from the perspective of John Doe No. 2or JD, as he is referred to in the book. With his ironic and curiously detached persona, JD narratesfrom a second-person point of viewhis secret life with McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and others in America''s militia culture as McVeigh and JD crisscross the Midwest in McVeigh''s beloved Chevy Geo Spectrum. John Doe No. 2 and the Dr
Trade Review
A bold attempt to inhabit the mind of an individual whose very existence remains in dispute, and in doing so Womack makes this phantom figure seem remarkably real. This is the power of good fiction, of course, and Womack pulls it off spectacularly, mixing historical detail of the 1995 Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City and of domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh with vividly imagined details of John Doe's possible unwilling involvement.
-- Dinty W. Moore, author of
Between Panic & DesireAn engaging read. Addresses issues of domestic terrorism that are still significant today in the national debate. The suspense is sustained throughout the narrative. Womack's novel leaves us with the poignantly uneasy reminder that it is not that hard to become a fallen Quaker, or fallen war hero.
-- Ray Petersen, author of
Cowkind and editor of
Drummed Out
