In the last two decades, the world of entertainment, books and beyond has been absolutely saturated with terrorism thrillers. The genre wasn’t exactly obscure before, but in the years since 9/11, we’ve seen an ongoing boom in a subgenre that, at this point, seems to have run out of surprises. Until, of course, the right storyteller comes along.
Sweeping, emotional and driven by a powerful ensemble of characters from all walks of life, Abir Mukherjee’s Hunted seeks to meld the personal and the political, the global and the local, and most importantly, the emotional and the procedural. It’s an ambitious offering, even for an acclaimed historical mystery author, which makes the book’s ability to meet its own high standards that much more impressive.
The narrative follows a group of disparate figures, all of whom have some connection to the bombing of a shopping mall in Los Angeles. Over the course of roughly one week, Hunted follows an FBI agent on the trail of the extremists responsible for the attack, a former U.S. serviceman who’s been radicalized in his own way, a young woman roped into a movement she might not fully grasp and, most powerfully, two parents from opposite sides of the world, both hoping to save their children from the grip of a terrorist plot of epic proportions.
That plot and its stakes are capably unspooled over the course of Hunted‘s 400 pages, and it’s clear from the beginning that Mukherjee knows how to marshal his talents as a seasoned mystery writer and bring them to bear on a narrative of this scope. His prose is sharp, brisk and moves at an appropriately breakneck pace, delivering the goods for anyone who’s looking for something that rockets them along with tight plotting and juicy twists.
But that plotting, solid though it is, is not what really makes Hunted work. That honor goes to the way Mukherjee is able to expertly blend action with genuinely emotional character work, even though not all of his characters are created equal in terms of the grip they have on the reader. Hunted is, at its core, a book about people who feel like the systems around them have let them down, and how they each respond to that disappointment. It’s a story of regrets, retribution and redemption, set within a truly epic thriller.
