Assassins' Trilogy

Sins of the Assassin

A Novel

by Robert Ferrigno

Scribner's, 400 pp., $24.95

With the publication of Sins of the Assassin, Robert Ferrigno is now two-thirds of the way toward completing a series of thrillers--with plenty of graphic violence, and some graphic sex--that also comprise a serious work of dystopian fiction.

The books take place in the 2040s, when most of what is now the United States has become an Islamic republic. (Most of the deeply Christian South--the Bible Belt--resists Islamic rule and secedes.) Ferrigno began his projected trilogy of popular fictional works on this theme with Prayers for the Assassin, which appeared in 2006; the concluding work is due out next year. To describe Ferrigno's brilliantly realized fictional universe, I'll draw on Prayers as well as the newly published Sins.

What led most of Ferrigno's America to Islamize? The immediate cause was the devastation wrought by suitcase nuclear bombs that destroyed New York and Washington (and, for good measure, Mecca) in 2015. These attacks were blamed on the Mossad. But the "Zionist Betrayal," as it came to be called, was not enough by itself to promote massive conversion to Islam. In the words of a historian quoted in Sins:

Western churches, rather than offering moral guidance, were weak and vacillating, unwilling to condemn even the most immoral behavior. Islam offered a bright light and a clear answer, and the faithful could not build mosques fast enough to satisfy the need. While no force of arms could defeat the armies of the West, it was their moral and spiritual void that ultimately vanquished them.

Furthermore, one of Ferrigno's characters adds the following analysis of what, for us, are current events: