Pooneh Sadeghi’s debut global thriller opens in Paris with the 1997 assassination of a widowed bookstore owner. Set nineteen years later in Madison Square Garden, the second chapter introduces protagonist Gabriel McKnight, successful thriller writer and retired Navy Seal as he learns his identical twin brother Mike has vanished. Also a former Navy Seal, Mike works undercover for the Bureau of Counterterrorism and had left the country on a secret mission without telling the family. Before Gabriel can learn any details of Mike’s disappearance, two men in suits approach Gabriel, informing him that an Iranian woman’s mutilated body has been found in his car on the Potomac River. Knowing that Mike is the only other person with access to that car and never having heard of the dead woman, Gabriel is about to go with the two detectives for questioning when something strikes him as very wrong. Managing to escape, he heads home to Washington, D. C., hoping to solve the mystery of his twin’s disappearance. Meanwhile, the police are pursuing Gabriel.

Learning of the dangerous circumstances in which Mike disappeared, Gabriel visits Mike’s apartment where a clue intentionally left for him leads Gabriel to a hidden safe. Clues inside the safe lead him to Noor Rahman, a young Iranian American woman, who lives near an assortment of relatives in Oklahoma City and whose parents had died mysteriously, her father in Iran and her mother as an Iranian refugee in Paris where Noor had been born after her father’s death. Conveniently, Gabriel and Mike grew up in Iran with foreign service parents, who knew Noor’s parents; both twins speak Farsi.

Together Gabriel and Noor discover more cryptic clues, some scattered throughout a volume of Rumi’s poems. One with a missing brother and the other wanting to understand her parents’ fates long ago, Gabriel and Noor begin to follow the clues, not knowing the dangers they will face in the global search taking them to Paris, Tehran, and Rumi’s grave in Turkey.

Having been taught Iranian history and Near Eastern poetry by her father as the family traveled from country to country on diplomatic missions, having studied comparative literature, and currently living in Oklahoma City as does her character Noor, Pooneh Sadeghi teaches readers her ancestral country’s history, acquaints them with Rumi’s poetry, and even takes them on a short tour of Oklahoma City before sending her main characters abroad. Yes, even the Oklahoma City coffee shop is real

Many readers of Rumi and the Retribution are likely to watch for numbers two and three in the series, scheduled for release in early and late 2025. Sadeghi also says she has a fourth in the works.

Thanks to NetGalley and Rogue River/Roan & Weatherford Publishing for an advance reader copy. My apology for the late review, but I received the ARC well after the release date.