THE MAN FROM AFGHANISTAN

The manhunt for an assassin stretches around the world in Aithal’s twisty debut thriller.

The story unspools from a Taliban plot to assassinate Terence Collins, a Republican congressman from California who’s introduced a bill in 2021 to reinvade Afghanistan. Talib, an Afghan American man who’s the Taliban’s top agent on the West Coast, is assigned the hit; he duly kills Collins with a sniper shot from a yacht anchored near the congressman’s seaside mansion. Using his considerable criminal guile, mastery of disguise, and the stolen identity of a heart surgeon named Ramesh Kumar, Talib flees to Mumbai, India, on his way to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pursuing him is Newport Beach Police Department Detective Tony Ramirez, assisted by telecommunications surveillance of the National Security Agency and by Inspector Sunil Deshpande of the Mumbai police. Ramirez, whose mother, Simran, is Indian and who speaks a smattering of Hindi, ends up in India himself, where he catches up with family and launches himself onto Talib’s trail. Aithal, the author of Beyond the Milky Way (2015), fleshes out this simple chase narrative with reams of intricate procedural details. The chapters from Talib’s third-person point of view regale readers with the nerve-wracking minutiae of the killer’s preparation and practice, disposal of evidence, use of makeup and disguises, and so on. (Readers also see the sneaky online ploys that the Taliban uses to radicalize Talib.) Tony’s sleuthing also features nifty moments, including a brute-force investigation of a day’s worth of airline passengers from Los Angeles to Mumbai. There are some effective scenes of violence, but most of the action is in the labyrinthine calculations of the adversaries, conveyed with chilling aplomb by Aithal’s punchy, hard-boiled prose: “He could have quickly put a bullet between his eyes and stuffed his body in the trunk of the Toyota….It would take at least 16 to 20 hours before the stench was noticeably pungent.” The result is a page-turner that offers suspense with real psychological depth.

A tense, entertaining terrorist-on-the-run action yarn.