A political thriller set in the late years of the George W. Bush presidency. The setting makes this feel a bit outdated and weirdly old fashioned. A good, but not great novel in the genre.

The Snares by Rav Grewal-Kok was one of a kind. I was born in 1997 and therefore was very young during 9/11. This story made me really think about the impacts that 9/11 had on the social dynamics in the United States. I also realized just how much the world I have lived in has been changed by the tragedy and made it more real to me. I don't remember much about that time, but this really helped me make connections and FEEL the impacts in a whole new way.

I was recently granted the opportunity to read the first book by the author (Rav Grewal-Kok). I was allowed to read an ARC version of the novel by the Author, his publishing company (Penguin Random House), and the fine folks at Net Galley in return for an honest review.

The main character, Neel Chima, is a deputy assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, Neel Chima is living the good life when he gets a phone call from a mysterious CIA official offering him the job. Neel has a loving wife, two adorable kids, and a house paid for by his rich father-in-law. But the lure of an important post at the Freedom Center, which runs parallel to the CIA in targeting suspected terrorists, is too much to resist.

While America is still reeling from the events of September 11th, Neel Chima is recruited into a new, ruthless federal intelligence agency – eager to seek revenge for their recent tragedy.

Chima is particularly attracted to accepting this opportunity as he feels this might be a chance to recover from some of the perceived discrimination that he faced as a first-generation American citizen when he served in the US Navy as a crew member on a Grumman EA-6B Prowler - which was/is a twin-engine, four-seat, mid-wing electronic-warfare aircraft. Operated by both the United States Marine Corps and the United States Navy between 1971 and 2019.

His role in this organization is as a Deputy Director, where he has the final say on intelligence that is combined with that of the other seventeen intelligence to better target the increased drone operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan against the Taliban.

After innocents in a Pakistani tribal region are mistakenly killed in a drone attack based on his cold analysis, his superiors convince him it’s all part of the job—that “the beauty of war by data is that it takes the moral question out of the discourse.”

Since January 2001, multiple drone strikes have been conducted Afghanistan by the United States government in Afghanistan. These strikes began during the administration of the United States President George W. Bush.

Between 2004 and 2018, the United States government expanded these operations by attacking thousands of targets in northwest Pakistan using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) operated by the United States Air Force under the operational control of the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division. Most of these attacks were on targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (now part of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province) along the Afghan border in northwest Pakistan. These strikes began during the administration of United States President George W. Bush, and increased substantially under his successor Barack Obama.

As part of his duties as Deputy Director of The Freedom Centre, he is sent on a trip to Thailand to meet with the leaders of the intelligence organizations of some allied nations. It is during this trip to Thailand, that an incident happens leading to the mishandling of some government documents (as an aside, most government documents are deemed to be more secure than civilian documents) . But following an FBI investigation into his drunken mishandling of top security papers during a trip to Thailand, he’s secretly pressured into targeting an outspoken young Muslim in Brooklyn and his life begins to implode. 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 . . .

On my self-determined five-star scale, I would give this novel a solid three and three-quarter stars (which rounds up to four stars on Goodreads) as I found that this novel plunges readers into the human turmoil behind the faceless operations—the torture, secret assassinations, and drone strikes—of the American security state, creating an eye-opening meditation on morality, violence, and the price of a human soul and represents a chilling introduction to intelligence agency thrillers.

As with all my literary ramblings, this is just my five cents worth.

He is asked to trade in his ordinary career for a chance at greatness

Neel Cheema, a Punjabi-American lawyer and son of immigrant parents, has spent his life pursuing the American dream. He started his career as a naval officer and later (after 9/11) went to work as a federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice. He is married to Rebecca, herself a tenured professor at Georgetown Law School and quite liberal despite her wealthy family's lineage and Republican leanings. and together they have two young daughters. Neel has achieved much in his life but is starting to feel a little burned out at the DoJ. When he gets a call from a storied figure, a man high up in the CIA known within government circles simply as the priest, he is surprised to hear that not only does this man know Neel's name, he views him as an up and comer who, given his military experience and Punjabi roots, could be of great value in the war against terrorism. He invites Neel to visit him at Langley to discuss a job offer with a newly formed intelligence agency, the Freedom Center. Compared to the work he is currently doing, this new opportunity is tempting....not only would he be doing work that truly made a difference, it could act as a springboard to a lucrative post-government career. Rebecca has her reservations about the offer....the intelligence world in the last years of President George W. Bush was wielding far-reaching powers with scaled down oversight, which made many observers nervous...but Neel accepts the job. As he embarks on his new position he is part of a program that targets individuals both in and outside of the US for observation and in some cases for actions up to and including assassination. Ambition bangs up against his moral core, and soon the work he is doing causes internal conflict a rift within his marriage and a noticeable impact on his children. When he makes an error in his recommendations to his superiors it is used as a weapon against him, pressuring him to pursue actions more extreme than he feels are warranted. Some of the people for whom he works as well as the sphere in which he is working are dragging him further into some very dark spaces, and he will have to choose between going along with what he is being asked to do or running afoul of people who can, and will, destroy his life.
The Snares is a tension-filled political thriller that looks at the world of intelligence from a new perspective, that of a man of color who despite being born an American has never felt that he "belongs". His insecurities are used to manipulate him, and his ambition may destroy the life he has worked so hard to achieve. The story takes a sharp look at a period in history that was marked by morally ambiguous activities, and the reader must sort through themes of complicit behavior, the dark side of the intelligence world and the toll that working in that sphere has on those who do the job. When idealism comes up against the uncomfortable realities of the world, what decisions get made? Which lines are acceptable to cross, and which must be held at all costs? The characters are well drawn, and the pacing tight and full of tension. Readers of authors like John Le Carré, Lauren Wilkinson and Olen Steinhauer should pick up a copy of this debut literary thriller which paints a world that is not dashing and glamorous but grey and murky. Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Company for allowing me access to this sobering story in exchange for my honest review

Ok wow. What a time to read this novel. It's a political thriller, not really my style. The main character is a Sikh indian attorney at the USDOJ who gets an opportunity to work for a new federal agency under the new Obama Administration called the Freedom Center that is basically a huge data aggregation operation that pulls from the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. to identify potential high-risk threats at a very surgical level. The premise is drone warfare -- if we know who the bad guys are, we can take them out vs. man-to-man combat and tons of civilian casualties. Now you know why I read it. Lots of moral and ethical questions here, shadowy figures and crises of conscious as our main character navigates this new career. It was a very tense and compelling read—until the end. I am often unsatisfied with endings -- and I was here, too. It's almost as if the author did not know what to do at the end and so just said "and I'm done." Still, this book is worth reading, especially now. It might even be an enjoyable book if it were not so prescient. Here are a few of my relevant quotes: "Security in the face of a public insurgency is domination and slaughter" (YIKES!) and "Power without recourse. Hooded figures in the night. The tools of dictatorshio in the hands of freedom-loving patriots." 3-3/4 stars.

This book as a certain audience, and I may not be part of that audience. I will say this, though: This book is smart and propulsive for the right person.

A taut literary thriller and quite an auspicious debut for an author that shows he is not afraid to confront uncomfortable truths. Highly recommended.

The political thriller The Snares by Rav Grewal-Kok examines individual mortality when challenged by ambition and perceived national safety at the risk of endangering people who look like his Sikh family members in the final weeks of George W. Bush’s presidency. While I love a good thriller, political thrillers are a little out of my comfort zone, which is maybe why I did not gel too well with The Snares.

I did enjoy the more introspective sections of our main protagonist, Neel, as he battled his desires to be a good husband and father, his perspectives on being the child of immigrants and a perceived outsider, and also his drive to make a career for himself. I felt Rebecca, his wife, was portrayed well as the moral compass. Sadly, I ended up skim-reading a lot of this book. The pacing felt off at times, and it was densely bogged down, for me, in too many Freedom Center details.

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.