The Last Patriot

The Last Patriot, a thriller novel by Brad Thor, follows Scot Harvath, a counterintelligence official and Islamic conspiracist working for the United States government. Compelled by a terrorist attack, Harvath attempts to uncover hidden violence in the Islamic state and influence the American public’s perception of people who hail from regions of the world containing people who follow Islam. Widely considered a work of right-wing propaganda containing a paucity of historical literacy, The Last Patriot has been criticized for advancing a distorted and white nationalist reading of Islam in the context of American-Islamic relations.

The novel begins by attempting to contextualize the storied and complicated history of Islam around the present day. It explains that in 632 A.D., in the Uranah Valley of Mount Arafat in Mecca, the Islamic prophet Muhammad was murdered after imparting a revelation to his followers. Next, it jumps to the late eighteenth century, when Thomas Jefferson, then an ambassador to France, signed a truce between the United States and a group of Muslim pirates on the Barbary Coast. The narrator describes this moment as formative to the two societies’ relationship with Islam.

The novel then proceeds to the events of the story’s present day. Harvath, a former Navy SEAL and current counterterrorism worker, is walking the streets of Paris with his girlfriend, Tracy, helping her distract herself from her recent exposure to a bomb explosion. Tracy has a headache but hides it from Harvath. Suddenly, at a nearby cafe, Harvath notices a man break into a car and push it down the street. In the space previously occupied by the car, a Mercedes parks. Harvath and Tracy move aside to let a person pass them; just then, he notices the driver of the Mercedes look at a photograph and press a button on a device. A bomb explodes, destroying the car, as Harvath jumps onto the man to protect him from the blast. Before a police response team arrives, Harvath takes the man’s wallet, learning his identity is Dr. Anthony Nichols.



Reluctantly, Harvath takes initiative to pursue the case, re-entering a field he has tried to leave. He and Tracy follow Nichols’s tracks back to his hotel. There, he interrogates him, finding that he works for the President in an archivist capacity. On the side, he works on the Jefferson archive related to his truce with the pirates of the Barbary Coast. These pirates believed that killing non-Muslims was justifiable. In his research, Nichols finds that an unknown revelation of Mohammed exists that did not make it into the Koran. He is sure that a certain copy of Don Quixote contains a code that will lead him to this final revelation. Harvath takes Tracy and Nichols to a safe house, agreeing to help the professor, who has never before been exposed to real terrorists.

Eventually, Harvath finds the book dealer. A man ambushes them, holding the dealer and Harvath at gunpoint. He brings them into the street, where the gunman makes Harvath a human shield to shoot police. While the gunman is distracted, Harvath escapes with the dealer through a different exit. The dealer tells Harvath that the book is inside a mosque in a shady part of Paris.

Around this time, in Washington, a man is arrested for murdering his lover Nura Khalifa, the niece of a doctor studying papers related to the Koran which were found at an archaeological site in Yemen. Nura was a member of the Foundation on American Islamic Relations; the man arrested claims he was asked by the FBI to infiltrate the group through a project called Glass Canyon. The police send him to the CIA, who are skeptical until he mentions their project. An agent finds a record reporting that a man named Matthew Dodds had been killed in action when he was only ever reported missing. The agent begins investigating in parallel with Harvath and Nichols, racing against the terrorists who want to destroy evidence of the last revelation.



Tracy suddenly falls ill and is rushed to the hospital for brain swelling. The French police take notice of their investigation and arrest Tracy, convinced she and Harvath are implicated in the car bombing. At the same time in the United States, it is revealed that Glass Canyon was created by FAIR to isolate its ideologically weak members. The man who attacked Nura was enlisted by the missing agent, Matthew Dodds, who had converted to Islam after suffering trauma from the murder of his wife and kid. Harvath finds Dodds and stops him before the terrorists cause more strife.

The Last Patriot presents America as a party to a “real” Islam that is constantly at odds with a distorted version propagated by terrorists, creating a uniquely American definition of Islamic culture.