A case of rising excitement and losing the plot
Like so many novels today, Hunted comes with with a great many thanks and acknowledgements, among them thanks to a number of good crime novelists, the book’s early readers. I find this odd, being unable to imagine Raymond Chandler seeking the opinion of a work in progress from Erle Stanley Gardner, though Gardner was a much better plotter than Chandler. But this is the way it is now.
It’s also the fashion for crime novels to be very long, too long in many cases, among them this one. The first half of Hunted is enjoyable and compelling, the second confusing.
It begins with a terrorist bomb. There should have been two bombs, one carried by a young white man, Jack, the other by a Muslim girl, Yasmin. But Jack had no bomb and walked away; Yasmin is dead among her victims. Clearly it’s Islamist terror again.
Soon the FBI is on the case, led by Agent Shreya (Indian but not Muslim.) She gets to work quickly on her smartphone – indeed, much of the investigation is done electronically. It does make the work easier, but it does make you wonder whether criminals can ever escape in the US, or indeed anywhere in the modern world.
Still things are not what they seem – well, they wouldn’t be, would they? There’s a mastermind at work, a white-haired woman called Miriam (perhaps). She’s holed up in a remote location with her bomb-maker, a crippled veteran of the Afghan war called Greg, the ghastly Jack and another Muslim girl, a Londoner called Aliyah.
This latter is a London Benghali and her family fled Bangladesh 20 years ago. Her father works at Heathrow, and he thought she was going to a teaching job in Japan. Now, however, her face appears everywhere on the world’s screens. No wonder he is confused and afraid.
Then he has a visitor, a middle-aged American woman, Carrie. She is searching for her son Greg and tells Sajid he must join her because his daughter is, she believes, in the same place.
They fly to Canada. She drives ahead while he makes an illegal entry into the USA through a forest. Great stuff and the hunt is on – though, as the title suggests the hunters are soon hunted themselves.
That, for review purposes, is enough, or almost enough of the plot. It is necessary only to add that there’s a rotten apple in the FBI, though you will be very acute to discover which agent is a baddie.
Furthermore, all of this is taking place in the last week of a Presidential election, with one of the candidates rather like Mr Trump. There are an awful lot of balls in the air, then, not to mention red herrings, and the skill with which Mukherjee juggles them all is admirable. Most of the time I was fairly clear as to what was happening and who was who. In a story like this that’s good going.
There’s a chase when Greg and Aliyah go on the run, and another chase by Carrie and Sajid in search of them. Meanwhile there’s no shortage of FBI gun-play and we mustn’t forget the sinister Miriam, who might well have escaped from a Bond novel.
Credulity is of course often strained, but that’s how it often is in this kind of novel. There are perhaps too many shoot-outs and casual killings, too, and the second half is not as good as the first. Still, Hunted is obviously destined to be a bestseller, and those who like this kind of novel will like it a lot. I read the first half at speed with great enjoyment, and if the second half was less gripping, that is often how it is when the plot unfolds.