The Snares

A Novel

De: Rav Grewal-Kök

Narrado por: Neil Shah

A Punjabi American lawyer at a mysterious federal intelligence agency fights to keep his career, marriage, and morality intact in this gripping post-9/11 drama from “our immigrant John le Carré” (Xuan Juliana Wang, author of Home Remedies).

“A chilling peek into U.S. Intelligence . . . Rav Grewal-Kök’s intriguing novel seems intent on unsettling us from its opening pages, with coolly precise prose that sneaks nimbly around the periphery of its characters’ darkest thoughts and actions.”—The New York Times

“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 his moral qualms mount, he is drawn farther and farther 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? An idealist or a mercenary? What truths, and whose lives, is he willing to sacrifice? The novel plunges listeners 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.

©2025 Rav Grewal-Kök (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“A chilling peek into U.S. intelligence . . . Rav Grewal-Kök’s intriguing novel seems intent on unsettling us from its opening pages, with coolly precise prose that sneaks nimbly around the periphery of its characters’ darkest thoughts and actions. . . . This accomplished debut . . . has adopted the techniques of the world it depicts—a realm of shadowy intelligence dominions where even the deadliest actions are carried out with calm detachment.”—The New York Times

“At once a gripping political thriller and a tense family drama, Grewal-Kök’s debut . . . [is] a striking and uncompromising meditation on the war on terror’s human cost.”—Publishers Weekly

“The tension never lets up in Grewal-Kök’s gripping first novel, which exposes a system that will always compromise its moral code. . . A terrific debut that finds new dimensions in the intelligence thriller.”—Kirkus Reviews