Action Packed

The general plot of a thriller involving terrorists is well known: the terrorists have an gruesome scheme in the works while an FBI/CIA/MI5 agent races to uncover the plan and capture the terrorists before their horrific plan is executed. In Abir Mukherjee’s Hunted, each of these elements is extensively fleshed out, and a couple of additional threads added to give the book more weight than your average potboiler.

The novel starts with a bomb explosion in a mall (as in Mick Herron’s Spook Street). Yasmin and Jack were supposed to set off the bombs, but in fact Jack was always planning to escape while Yasmin dies in the explosion — the first intimation that the terrorist group may have master plans beyond what their hapless frontline people know. There are more young Muslim girls being trained in the terrorist group, suggesting more such events are planned. One of these girls, Aliyah, a British-Muslim, is one of the central characters. The bombs are being made by Greg, ex-US-Army, ex-Afghanistan-vet, but whose commitment to the group is a little imperfect.

On the other side is not Jack Bauer, but a welcome replacement: Shreya Mistry, whose brown skin and history add a layer of complexity to the usual FBI agent trope. In every other way Shreya is the typical maverick agent of such novels: argumentative, viewed as difficult by her FBI supervisors, a broken family life behind her, but with lightning analytical skills and ‘hunches’ that are invariably right.

Mukherjee diverges from the familiar plotline by adding another thread: Aliyah’s Bangladeshi-British father Sajid thinks his daughter is teaching English in Japan, and is stunned to see her photograph on the news as a potential terrorist. He is contacted by Carrie, the mother of Greg: Sajid and Carrie set off in a quixotic attempt to find their children somewhere in the US before the authorities capture them.

The plot becomes a little thin at this point. Sajid and Carrie have very little information that is unavailable to the FBI, and few financial resources. Sajid is a brown Muslim whose daughter is wanted as a terrorist, so he would be unlikely to get a visa to the US or most Western countries and would undoubtedly draw attention. Yet Carrie is for some reason insistent that ‘she cannot do this without him’, and pressures him into sneaking across the Canadian border near Vancouver.

Now the race is on: the FBI is after Sajid and Carrie, who are chasing Aliyah and Greg, who in turn are heading for their final terrorist assignment. The FBI is also, of course, chasing Aliyah and Greg and the other members of the terrorist group, but except for Shreya, they are bureaucratic incompetent plodders who make odd decisions.

The female characters are at the center of this novel, but I thought their portrayal was a little weak. Miriam, the mastermind behind the terrorists, is a stereotypical leader of a cult: intense, dramatic, secretive. Shreya is invariably the only FBI agent to make any logical deductions, and it gets a bit repetitive when every single hunch of hers is correct. Carrie is a bully, harrassing the reluctant Sajid. Sajid’s wife is reduced to another stereotype: the Bangladeshi immigrant who opposes any freedom for her daughters and is only concerned with ‘what will people say?’ Aliyah’s motivations remain an enigma so that they can be slowly revealed, but this approach also means that she is something of a closed book through much of the book.

The male characters are handled better. Sajid is the best-written: decades of racism lie behind his life in Britain, but it is the fate of his daughters that really wears him down. Greg is fiercely protective of Aliyah and willing to sacrifice his life for her. Even Shreya’s ex-husband Nikhil is a very kind person, rushing to Shreya’s father’s bedside when she cannot, and is a good father to their teenage daughter.

The pace of the novel is frenetic. Barely have Sajid and Carrie reached the isolated terrorist camp in Oregon when people are captured and interrogated and let free or escape and then are on the run with other people on the chase. The three chases make for a hectic switching back and forth between tense storylines, as well as travel all across America, suspicions of leaks and moles, twists and turns. The resolution is well framed, but the motives of the terrorists remained murky to me.

The writing is taut but sometimes slips into that torrid Robert Ludlum style with short incomplete sentences and italicized phrases.

And then she saw it: the tank.

That, he realized, was her gift. The ability to get into your head and your heart. [..] And all she asked for in return was your trust. And absolute obedience.

As with many novels today, the chapters are written in several voices, and as always, I wished the author had restrained himself to one or two. As also with most thrillers, it requires some suspension of disbelief on the part of the readers.

The acknowledgements include