When I wrote about Lou Aguilar’s “The Washington Trail” two years ago, I ended with its hero, Mark Tristan, looking at a poster for the John Wayne film “El Dorado.” He figured Hollywood didn’t make movies like that anymore. They were, he joked, too likely to offend someone.
There was some truth in his complaint. But Aguilar’s novel also made a case for the old-fashioned hero: a sharp-tongued former Army Ranger, a more bookish partner, and a world of dangerous villains and romantic entanglements where nobody seems especially worried about getting permission to be charming.
Tristan and Neil Cork return in “The Camelot Trail,” with a new cause to take up. This time, it involves knights, Arthurian legend, and a professor whose ideas are making him powerful enemies.
Knights wanted
Ian Ousby is a British literature professor living in Washington and teaching at Georgetown. He’s also the author of the bestselling “Excalibur” and the public face of a fast-growing youth movement with the same name.
Ousby’s message is deliberately traditional: young men should be strong, Christian protectors and providers, while young women should value femininity, beauty, marriage, and motherhood. He believes Western civilization is worth defending, and that the ideals of Arthurian chivalry might offer something to a generation raised on TikTok.
He has, unsurprisingly, made enemies. After death threats from Islamists, feminists, and other political radicals, Ousby left Britain. His estranged wife works at the British embassy, and someone seems intent on stopping him before a major Excalibur rally on the National Mall.
There may be another problem, too. Ousby has started seeing Laura Darwell, the woman he loved decades ago and hasn’t encountered in nearly 30 years. He spots her on a Metro platform and nearly gets himself killed trying to pull her away from an approaching train. Later, she appears on Georgetown’s Exorcist Steps, again with dangerous consequences.
No one else can see her.
Ousby hires Cork and Tristan to protect him and figure out what’s happening. Their investigation soon moves beyond the possibility that the professor is simply hallucinating.
Boys’ own adventure
As in the earlier novel, a good deal of the fun comes from seeing two very different detectives tackle the same problem. Cork is thoughtful, well-read, happily married, and not entirely comfortable with his gun. Tristan, an Afghanistan veteran, is more at home in a fight than with a book.
When Cork tells Ousby that Tristan once had help with a Dickens paper, Tristan can only manage one response: “Pip.” Cork says his partner still has flashbacks from the assignment. Tristan repeats the word.
Aguilar leaves their contrast intact. Cork handles the deductions; Tristan is usually the one dealing with the physical danger. Still, each has a way of surprising the other, and sometimes the reader, too.
Raquel Valdez, the Venezuelan former police officer introduced in the first book, has a larger role this time. She’s an excellent shot, but feels out of her depth when books, art, and poetry come up. Ousby starts opening that world to her, and Tristan encourages her, a little to his own surprise.
She tells him that the world now feels larger, more mysterious, and more exciting. It’s hard not to think Aguilar feels much the same way.
Beltway bailiwick
One of the first book’s strengths was Aguilar’s feel for Washington, and that continues here. Georgetown’s row houses, the Metro, the National Mall, and the Exorcist Steps all feel like actual places, not just familiar names attached to a thriller. Aguilar worked as a young reporter in the city, and that knowledge gives the story a grounding presence, even as the plot gets increasingly strange.
What begins as a bodyguard job and a possible case of induced hallucination grows into international intrigue, experimental technology, a kidnapping, and a conspiracy with stakes well beyond Ousby’s safety.
The story has some of the flavor of the old Tom Clancy technothrillers: complicated plans, unusual hardware, and villains with geopolitical ambitions. The machinery can become a bit much, and some of the science asks for patience. Still, Aguilar keeps the pace up. His detectives are entertaining company even when they’re doing little more than needling each other.
Politically incorrect
Aguilar also has a clear interest in bringing sex appeal back to popular fiction. His women are beautiful, his men notice, and the story doesn’t pause to apologize for it. Masculinity, here, is more often treated as a virtue than a problem to be diagnosed.
His politics lean conservative, but disagreement isn’t automatically presented as a sign of bad character. That’s a welcome quality. In “The Washington Trail,” left-leaning characters weren’t simply fools or villains, and the new book keeps that approach, especially through Tristan’s great love, Nina Holt.
Holt is a liberal television journalist. Tristan calls her network the “Commie News Network,” but she’s also smart, funny, attractive, and very much someone he loves. Their political disputes feel like the arguments of two people who know each other well, rather than a debate staged for an audience. Aguilar has his preferences, certainly, but he doesn’t let them crowd out the romance.
He’s also willing to poke fun at Tristan. The former Ranger is briefly less enthusiastic about Ousby’s movement when he learns that its vision of tough men and attractive women includes marriage.
“Oh,” Tristan says.
A new Camelot
Ousby points out that Tristan shares his name with Sir Tristan, a Round Table knight known for a tragic love story. Tristan’s reply is that it sounds familiar.
For all his flirting and wisecracks, he has always had a chivalrous streak. When someone helpless is in danger, he moves toward it. Cork does the same, though he’d prefer to understand the situation first.
Aguilar builds an entertaining thriller around the unfashionable idea that courage, loyalty, romantic love, and duty might still matter. He makes that case without giving up the jokes, fistfights, beautiful women, or increasingly improbable dangers that make this kind of story such an easy pleasure to read.
People may say they don’t make books like this anymore. Readers of “The Camelot Trail” might disagree.
