Hunted

by Abir Mukherjee ★★☆☆☆

On paper, Hunted was right up my alley: a domestic terrorist organization wreaks havoc just before the U.S. presidential election, while FBI counterterrorism units and a rogue set of parents mobilize to try to stop them before it's too late. But as I plodded through the novel, more and more holes continued to emerge, to the point that this became one of my most disappointing reads of the year.

The novel opens with a meticulously plotted suicide bombing at a California mall, carried out by a pair of young adults. One of them -- a white male -- flees from the scene before the bomb goes off, but the other -- a British, Muslim woman -- is killed in the blast. A group calling themselves the Sons of the Caliphate take credit for the bombing and vow there will be more. FBI Special Agent Shreya Mistry is one of the first on the scene, and she risks her life penetrating the unstable buildings to review security video of the bombing, nearly losing her own life in the process. The game of cat and mouse has begun.

There were a few components of the novel that diminished its effectiveness for me. For starters, the characters I was supposed to be cheering for were difficult to like. All had flaws, which normally makes me appreciate and like them more, but in this instance the flaws seemed to undermine my ability to become invested in those characters. Whether it was the "love" story between Greg the bomb maker and terror recruit Aliyah that just rang false, or FBI Agent Mistry selfishly ignoring her ailing father or consistently disobeying orders to "follow her gut", too many of the characters' actions pushed me to like them less.

Then there was the social commentary. I am all in favor of an author taking an action-laced thriller and adding depth to something that is mostly plot-driven, but Mukherjee does so in a heavy-handed way throughout the book that fails to be as eye-opening as I suspect he wishes it to be. There's an endless string of white people being portrayed as racist, be it through their actions (Greg-the-bomb-maker's mother, who after traveling with terror-recruit Aliyah's father for days exclaims at one point, "This is your fault! You and that fucking religion of yours.") or through accusation (Shreya, at one point thinking, "Dammit, wasn't that what white folks did -- mistaking one brown woman for another as though they were interchangeable?"). Or take this soliloquy in which a character states the following:

"You wouldn't understand. Growing up Muslim in London, you grow up fast, Other people, white people, they look at you like there's something wrong with you, something suspicious. Like we're all terrorists. They don't see you as British, even though God knows you are, 'cause there's nowhere else you've ever lived. So you think fuck it, fuck them. Fucking hypocrites with their double standards. Dropping bombs on defenseless people, selling weapons to dictators, and then when innocent people fight back, they become the terrorists. You get pissed off by it all: the racism, the bigotry, the fucking dishonesty."

Similar sentiments are universally and consistently expressed throughout the novel, by multiple characters that all seem to have the same point of view: that white people are universally racist. The lack of nuance obliterates the meaningfulness of the message. Mukherjee's ham-fisted treatment of a difficult topic didn't open my eyes; instead it made me roll them.

Lastly, my biggest issue was with some gaping plot holes, none more obvious than in the final 50 pages of the novel. Suffice it to say that the security lapses presented in the novel were laughably unbelievable, and unfortunately the plot hinged on those. In the wake of the real-life security failures we saw during the attempted Trump assassination earlier this year, maybe those lapses aren't quite so unbelievable, but they occurred in the novel when the entire country was in a heightened state of alert and the threat of an attack was extremely high. Then, just hours after a security breach, the basic lapses (no metal detector, no bag search) occurred again! That was the moment I gave up on this novel.

Clearly, this is not one that I would recommend. There are so many better thrillers out there. S.A. Cosby blends great plotting with social commentary as well as anyone -- check out Blacktop Wasteland or All the Sinners Bleed for a far more effective example of a thriller with some extra depth.