Book review: Sheepdogs by Elliot Ackerman

By Simon Demetriou

There are so many situations where jargon can be off-putting. Thankfully, thriller novels about military intelligence are not one of these. Indeed, you want your novelist to earn your trust that he/she knows the inner workings of the murky world of espionage and paramilitary manoeuvres by throwing about a load of acronyms and terms that you need to stick into Google to be able to understand. Elliot Ackerman’s latest book drove me to Google again and again, but it also made me want to spend as little time going down internet rabbit holes as possible, because I just wanted to keep reading. You can only imagine my joy, then, when I got to the end to find an epilogue strongly hinting at further Sheepdog novels.

This is not a book about dogs. Only one dog appears, and the poor thing doesn’t fare well. It is, however, a book about people with nicknames: Skwerl, a disgraced former CIA paramilitary now living on a farm in Pennsylvania supported by his partner, the high-end dominatrix Mistress S; Cheese, the greatest fighter pilot ever produced by the Afghan military now living outside Austin and working at an ESSO station following the evacuation of Kabul; Uncle Tony, the man who manages America’s off-the-books armies; and Just Shane, former CIA bomb disposal expert turned off-the-grid conspiracy theorist. Throw in an Amish masochist, a car salesman turned congressman, and a deeply vengeful Afghan assassin, and you have quite the cast.

And what about Sheepdog? His is the nickname whose owner is never revealed, but who prompts the novel’s story by – ostensibly – sending an email to a secret network he runs asking for two men to ‘repossess’ (steal) a private jet in return for a million dollars. Needless to say, Sqwerl and Cheese take the gig; the gig does not go as planned; and through this ludicrous and highly dangerous endeavour, they are thrown into a caper involving the varied and highly entertaining cast of characters listed above, in a story that has them stopping in Marseille, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Poland and Ukraine.

In the hands of a weaker writer, the plot and characters could devolve into slapstick or a heavy-handed sense of attempted quirkiness. Ackerman pulls the whole thing off brilliantly, humanising each one of his people, and pushing the plot along with a combination of tension and humour that makes reading a joy. Yes, the book is a bit silly. Yes, it deals with topics that some might feel ‘deserve’ more serious handling. If you don’t enjoy a bit of silliness and don’t believe that dark matters can be manipulated lightly, then don’t read the book. I hope that doesn’t apply to you, because Sheepdogs is terrific.