A Punjabi American lawyer at a mysterious new federal intelligence agency fights to keep his career, marriage, and morality intact in this gripping post-9/11 drama from a thrilling new voice.
"Are you happy where you are? Toiling in the trenches of the Justice Department?"
In the waning months of George W. Bush's presidency, Neel Chima, a former Naval officer and federal prosecutor, is recruited to join a new federal intelligence agency-one with greater-than-usual powers and fewer-than-usual restrictions. Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in the surveillance of domestic terrorism suspects and the selection of foreigners for drone assassination-men who often look just like his Sikh family members. As both his ambitions and moral qualms mount, he is drawn further and further away from his wife and two young daughters. When he makes a critical mistake at work, he is left vulnerable to shadowy figures in the intelligence world who seek to use him in their own, still more radical counterterrorism missions. If he agrees, the world of power will open up even wider to him. If he doesn't...
Is Neel an insider or an outsider? The hunter or the hunted? Whose ideals is he fighting for, and at what cost? Trapping readers alongside Neel in a web of paranoia, this novel puts a disturbing and memorable human face to the bureaucrats behind the torture, covert assassinations, and drone strikes of the past twenty years. It's an eye-opening plunge into American counterterrorism and an unsettling meditation on the great costs of power.
