This book was very good. A terrifying account of how a "good" man can do terrible things and also how a "good" country can betray its values in the name of security. Grewal-Kök crafts a tense, psychologically complex narrative that pulls the reader deep into the murky world of post-9/11 intelligence work, where morality is not just compromised but weaponized. Neel Chima is both a compelling protagonist and a tragic figure—his initial idealism erodes as he is seduced by power, his conscience bending under the weight of political necessity.

What makes The Snares so gripping is how it refuses easy answers. Is Neel a victim or a villain? A patriot or a pawn? The novel’s cynicism about American power is unflinching, and yet it never feels didactic. Instead, it presents a world so plausible, so disturbingly real, that it forces us to confront our own complicity in the mechanisms of state violence.

Thank you to Netgalley for my free copy in exchange for my honest review. What a thrilling and exciting read! I loved the writing and the pace of this book. And the characters were so interesting! I couldn't put the book down. Excellent!

This was a really well written book! It is not something I normally read, but it kept me interested and I enjoyed it. It had a lot of interesting things brought up, and it made you question things. Like question what is real and not real/ truthful in our day to day lives. I liked it!

Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complementary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!

“We’re in bed with some very bad people,” Neel Chima, the morally challenged protagonist of Rav Grewal-Kok’s chilling intelligence agency thriller, “The Snares,” tells an agency colleague after hearing a Thai colonel recount how he left his wife to drown at sea.
“My God,” Neel says, not soothed by his boss telling him, "just remember that we’re different, we don't kill innocents.”
This as a U.S. drone strike paved for by Neel ends up leaving an eight-year-old boy with a stump for a leg and 11 people dead – something that’s leaked to the media and has the agency hustling Neel out of sight while things cool off.
“You took one for the team,” his boss attempts to mollify him, a sentiment shared by a female colleague from whom he seeks comfort but whose only solace is to tell him that while the agency kills women and children, it doesn’t mean to – a stance diametrically at odds with that of Neel’s wife, the moral center of the novel who tells him in no uncertain terms that there’s no “silver lining” to what he’s doing – “we’re in a horror movie,” she says.
Very much Robert Stone country this is, with a dash of Newton Thornburg – indeed, Grewal-Kok’s striking ending put me in mind of the equally striking ending in Thornburg’s “Cutter and Bone,” which, as here, pulls no punches in holding America’s feet to the fire – with Thornburg and Stone, about Vietnam, and here, about drone warfare.

Rav Grewal-Kök does a fantastic job of blurring the lines between fact and fiction, interspersing real events in between the character’s journey down a devastating rabbit hole of introspection in the world of espionage.