Abir Mukherjee’s remarkable first thriller — a departure from his award-winning Wyndham and Banerjee crime series — follows a terrorist crisis during a US presidential election campaign. Opening with a suicide bomber killing 65 people in a Los Angeles mall, it climaxes with a threat to both candidates and their supporters at final rallies in Florida. In between, Shreya Mistry, an FBI agent, traces the cell responsible to the northwest, pursues two of its members across America, gradually realises that another pair of FBI targets are the innocent parents of brainwashed jihadists, and comes to question whether Islamism really underlies the bombings.
Hunted is a phenomenal achievement, with its sizeable cast of memorable characters, flawless juggling of multiple storylines, and a political dimension that makes
