Thriller ‘Hunted’ finds parents searching for their children and trying to prevent disaster

Abir Mukherjee arrived on the literary scene in 2016 with a different kind of crime novel. Set in Raj-era India, “A Rising Man” followed two officers of the Imperial Police Force, Capt. Sam Wyndham and trusty sidekick Sgt. Surendranath “Surrender-not” Banerjee, as they tracked a killer while navigating civil unrest.

In his debut and four other books, Mukherjee served up a winning concoction of murder mystery, strong characterization and authentic period detail.

Since reaching the bitter end of the fifth book, readers have been on tenterhooks to discover where Mukherjee will take his double act next. We will have to wait longer to find out, for the British-Indian author’s latest, “Hunted,” is a stand-alone thriller that swaps colonial Calcutta for contemporary America. With no need to recap or reintroduce old characters, Mukherjee starts afresh and cuts to the chase. And what a chase it is.

Presidential elections are one week away and the tension is palpable. When terrorists blow up an L.A. shopping mall, killing 65 people, its impact is far-reaching. At Heathrow Airport, Sajid Khan, once a “bombed-out, shell-shocked refugee” from Bangladesh and now a British national, is taken in for questioning. His daughter, Aliyah, entered the U.S. with the perpetrator of the atrocity and is now missing.

Then Carrie Flynn from Florida turns up at Sajid’s door and stokes his fear and confusion. She has reason to believe her son, Greg, a battle-scarred army vet, is with Aliyah in Portland and they’re part of a group that is planning a drastic course of action. Will he join her in finding their fugitive children before the authorities catch them? Acutely aware of the difficulties — “He was a Muslim whose daughter was on the run” — Sajid throws in his lot with this stranger and begins his frantic search.

Meanwhile, FBI Special Agent Shreya Mistry races against the clock to prevent another attack. She refuses to accept that Islamic extremists are the culprits and, after ruffling feathers and breaking rules, she is suspended from duty. It doesn’t stop her doing her job, and as she homes in on Greg and Aliyah and hunters become hunted, she realizes there is a bigger, more disturbing picture: a traitor in the Bureau, a “soldier masquerading as messiah” and a conspiracy to overhaul the political system.

You don’t so much read the 400 pages of this novel as tear through them on an exhilarating adrenaline rush. Mukherjee packs in all the tricks and tropes we come to expect in a thriller but renders them tighter and sharper: The pace is more propulsive, the cliff-hangers more suspenseful and the twists more surprising.

Add to the mix an abundance of punchy lines (“He didn’t even hear the gunshot over the sound of his own breath”) and we have a hugely satisfying book that will tide us over until Wyndham and Banerjee ride again.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Hunted

By: Abir Mukherjee.

Publisher: Mulholland, 400 pages, $30.