Dead Ringer by Chris Hauty

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on December 2, 2025

Celebrated authors like Don DeLillo and Stephen King have used John F. Kennedy’s assassination as the springboard for fascinating plots. Less celebrated writers have done the same with varying results. Chris Hauty joins the crowd with a story that imagines a conspiracy involving a shadowy Catholic organization that oversaw many of the world’s most significant assassinations, including JFK, RFK, and MLK.

Hauty’s conspirators are concerned that America is tilting toward progressive policies that failed to challenge godless communists. In defiance of history and the US Constitution, the conspirators embrace the popular but mistaken notion that America’s founders meant for the US to be a Christian nation. The First Amendment demonstrates the fallacy of their belief, as does the constitutional prohibition against establishing a religious test for public office, but the conspirators in Dead Ringer want to destroy the Constitution by turning the US into a Catholic theocracy.

Hauty’s protagonist is Joe Mingus. Hauty’s Joe works as a bouncer at a strip club in Baltimore (not to be confused with David Gordon’s Joe the Bouncer, who works at a strip club in Queens). While Joe the Bouncer is a former Special Forces operative, Joe Mingus is a former Secret Service agent who was charged with protecting the president. Mingus made an error of judgment as he tried to protect a fellow agent from a sex scandal. He lost his job and earned a felony conviction that prevents him from carrying a firearm.

The story begins with Olivia Heller, an information specialist with the National Archives. Olivia stumbled upon evidence that Alex Tarasenko’s report on President Kennedy’s assassination is not just an urban legend. Olivia chooses to die early in the novel rather than revealing her evidence to killers employed by a “secret organization of orthodox, ultraconservative Catholics in the US, intent on bringing about what they have designated the ‘Next America’.” The organization is known as the Movement.

Before she died, Heller sent history professor and Jesuit brother Juan Verdugo a video message that sends Verdugo on a quest to recover the Tarasenko dossier. For reasons that can only be explained as plot drivers (if the events didn’t happen, there would be no plot), Tarasenko encrypted a series of clues, leading Verdugo on a treasure hunt to find the hidden materials.

Olivia was shagging Tarasenko back in the day, but a year before her death, she was shagging Mingus. When Mingus learned of Olivia’s death, he assumed she was murdered. In search of vengeance, he goes to Olivia’s townhouse, hoping to find information that will lead him to her killer. There he discovers Verdugo, who — in response to a text message Olivia sent minutes before her death — is retrieving a book he loaned to Olivia. Mingus soon receives a text that Olivia had arranged to be sent after her death. The text asks him to protect Verdugo.

The quest begins in Washington D.C., where Mingus and Verdugo must steal an old cipher machine that Tarasenko used in the 1960s to encrypt his clues. The plot sends Mingus and Verdugo to Dallas, New Orleans, and Mexico City as they solve riddles that lead them to the next clue The novel’s final chapters provide a barely plausible explanation for the treasure hunt, so I’m not going to trash Hauty for structuring the story around it, despite my inability to buy into the plot.

I think it was Chekov who said that if an action hero gives a shooting lesson to a priest in act one, the priest will shoot someone in act three. Enough said about that.

I credit Hauty for his painstaking research. The novel is soaked in details about the Kennedy assassination and the conspiracy theories to which it gave birth. That lore, real or imagined, is at least as interesting as Mingus’ attempt to find the truth.

The final reveal is so far over the top that I also give Hauty credit for having the audacity to go there. I don’t know the true facts surrounding the Kennedy assassination, but Hauty’s version won’t pass anyone’s plausibility test, notwithstanding his ability to weave the threads of history into a new design. Does that matter? The more a story entertains me, the less concerned I am about plausibility. The balance in Dead Ringer weighs more on the entertainment side of the scale.

The aftermath of the reveal imagines a better America — a path forward, toward democracy and away from those who try to subvert it. Nice to imagine — and I can’t fault a happy ending — but the aftermath might be even less plausible than the reveal. The movement that Mingus works to overcome doesn’t compare to the movement that, for the moment, holds the nation in a death grip.

Mingus doesn’t have much personality but he has enough to serve the ends of the story. Verdugo is true to his Jesuit calling. The bad guys are typical masters of the universe, apart from a religiously motivated assassin who gives religion a bad name. The assassin overcomes a surprising number of wounds but keeps on killing. While he is yet another implausible element in the novel, the story delivers sufficient action to please thriller fans and is sufficiently nutty to engage the attention on conspiracy theorists.

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Storm Rising by Chris Hauty

Published by ‎ Atria/Emily Bestler Books on May 3, 2022

The “storm” in Storm Rising is a white separatist conspiracy to carve a whites-only nation out of Texas and other states that fall within the Permian Basin. The conspirators expect to gain power by controlling the nation’s largest oil deposits. A congressman, local politicians, a few military leaders, and some cops are orchestrating the scheme. The Storm movement blends white supremacy, nationalism, and hatred of government, the three pillars of far-right extremism. The congressman doesn’t care about hatred or ideology, but he does care about power. He wants to see his face on the dollars minted by the Free States of America.

The story begins with exploding oil storage tanks near Texas oil wells. The bodies of two Spanish-speaking migrants are found at each site. Ignoring the improbability that terrorists would be so inept, the far right immediately claims that drug cartels, or maybe just migrants in general, have declared war on the US. The Texas governor dispatches the Texas Army National Guard to help score a political victory from the mayhem. The real victory that the conspirators hope to achieve is more sinister, although only as a matter of degree. Stoking racial and ethnic hatred hurts the country even if it is not meant to further a civil war.

Hayley Chill is an operative of the “deeper state.” Trained by the military and a proficient mixed martial arts fighter, Chill works for an ambiguously defined entity called Publius. The organization is tasked with “preserving the nation’s constitutional democracy.” These days, that’s a tall order.

This is the third Hayley Chill novel but the first I’ve read. The story mentions that Hayley saved the nation from a president who was a Russian spy, presumably in one of the earlier novels. I can’t imagine where he got that idea (said the reviewer in a comment that drips sarcasm).

Hayley catches wind of the white supremacist conspiracy while digging into the mystery of her father’s death. Hayley is haunted by the memory of finding her father swinging at the end of a rope. She thought he died in Iraq, but she found him dead in the home of his old buddy Charlie Hicks. Did he come back to the US in secrecy and assume Hicks’ identity? Why did he abandon his family? Her only clues suggest that her father (and/or Charlie Hicks) were involved with something called the Storm that will not be good for democracy. She convinces Publius to send her to Texas to investigate.

The thought that insurrectionists could hold their newly acquired nation is far-fetched, but their “ace in the hole” plan to do so is the final component of the conspiracy that Hayley discovers in her investigation. It is the nature of conspiracy plots to be far-fetched but this one has currency, given the number of Americans who supported the overthrow of democracy by overturning a fair election. I give Chris Hauty credit for plugging obvious plot holes, making the conspiracy sufficiently plausible to encourage my willing suspension of disbelief.

Hauty’s prose gives the story a sense of urgency, making this a “just one more chapter before I sleep” book. The action is relentless, but Hauty does not sacrifice characterization as he speeds the novel to a satisfying conclusion. Hauty adds interest to the story by giving capsule descriptions of the lives that minor characters led before they played a role in the novel and/or the lives they will live after the novel ends. He gives heroic roles to people who, like most Americans, care about democracy and resent the idea that a “civil war” would suddenly make them residents of a new country they neither want nor support. White supremacists won’t like this novel, but the majority of thriller fans should find that its combination of action and characterization pushes all the right buttons.

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