Sign-In
Cart
Ordinary Targets
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 22 2026
Pages: 544
Weight: 1.58
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In the semiquincentennial year, America is ready to celebrate itself.
Banners hang from school doors. Civic committees prepare speeches. Children make paper stars and write sentences about home. Across the country, the machinery of public memory is already in motion.
Then the attacks begin.
Not only spectacular attacks against crowds and infrastructure, but smaller strikes against the ordinary places where a nation learns to trust itself: bus routes, church doors, libraries, pantries, summer programs, neighborhood gatherings, and family routines. The targets are ordinary because ordinary life is where civilization actually lives.
But death is not the only purpose.
As the violence spreads, so do the explanations. Planted evidence, false witnesses, contradictory rumors, and instant certainty move faster than facts. Parents, pastors, police, soldiers, officials, and families under strain find themselves pulled into a campaign designed not merely to frighten Americans, but to make them accuse, sort, harden, and turn on one another before truth can arrive.
In Dallas, a mother tries to protect her child without surrendering the meaning of home. A police lieutenant fights institutional hunger for false certainty. A systems analyst begins to see the shape of the campaign. A priest keeps his church open when fear wants every door managed. A Guardsman learns that sometimes the most faithful act is not to advance. And one broken participant in the machinery of violence discovers, too late and not cleanly, that usefulness to evil is not the same as belonging.
Set against the uneasy celebrations of the American semiquincentennial, Ordinary Targets is a tense literary thriller about terrorism, public fear, manipulated meaning, and the fragile line between protection and panic. It is a novel about what happens when a country is tempted to see enemies everywhere-and about the ordinary people who must fulfill their vocations when the nation's survival depends not on spectacle, but on refusal.
The violence is real.
The danger is real.
The test is whether America will become what fear demands.
And somewhere, in a child's hand, a paper star still says: America is still our home.
Also from
Heiser, J. D.
Also in
Mystery & Thriller
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
Coffin Road: An Utterly Gripping Crime Thriller from the Author of the China Thrillers
May, Peter
Paperback
Sabine's Notebook: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Continues
Bantock, Nick
Hardcover
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Movie Tie-In Edition): Book 1 of the Millennium Trilogy
Larsson, Stieg
Paperback
The Golden Mean: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Concludes
Bantock, Nick
Hardcover
Big Little Truths: Reese's Book Club: A Novel: The Sequel to Big Little Lies
Moriarty, Liane
Hardcover
The Pirate Queen: A Novel from the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Frozen River
Lawhon, Ariel
Hardcover