One of my fellow Splinters has been banging on about this book! I hadn't taken the bait as the title didn't grab me; somehow the Bunyanesque handle put me off. 800 pages of someone on a pilgrimage? I didn't warm to the idea. So get the idea out of the head, quite simply this novel is a gripping thriller. It's scary, an inventive spy/terrorist narrative with plausible plot-lines.
Terry Hayes is a former journalist and screenwriter. He has been an investigative reporter, a political correspondent and columnist. He is writing on his own territory. If, like me, you like to intersperse seriously good, top notch, intelligent writing with a well-written and compelling page-turner then Pilgrim fits the bill. Think Jack Reacher, but so much better on all fronts!
Amazon says:
Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn’t exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.
But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder – and Pilgrim wrote the book.
What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.
WHAT I THOUGHT
‘Two psychos enter, and one
psycho leaves. Good entertainment for readers with a penchant for mayhem, piles
of bodies and a lethal biochemical agent or two.’ Kirkus Reviews
This is certainly a page-turner, a race against time between two sharp
minds, determined to prevail. In a
nutshell, a former intelligence
agent who wrote a book on forensic pathology becomes involved in a case where
someone uses his book to commit untraceable murders. Because of the agent’s
earlier career, he also gets involved in another case involving a threat
involving an ex-Afghan fighter who uses the network he established fighting the
Soviets to reverse engineer a virus which threatens humanity. The fighter is turned as an eleven-year old
boy when he witnesses the public beheading of his father in a Saudi Arabian
square.
In trying to get inside the mind of the Saracen,
Pilgrim has to use his intuition and intelligence from the highly sophisticated
technology which is available to the intelligence agencies, i.e. the FBI. From all the data that is gleaned from
signals, mobile phone calls etc that are being picked up by the FBI ultimately
there is one trace that the human intelligence machine determines is likely to
be ‘the one’. They run with that
link. Then there is the coincidence of
the relationship between the meeting of the policewoman Leyla Cumali in
connection with the murder of the American woman in the run-down
apartment. She happens to be the sister
of Saracen. These threads spun just so
make for clever plotting.
What I admire about this thriller is that Terry
Hayes switches between providing detailed character studies of the two
protagonists with a narrative of roller-coaster action which shifts across
continents leading to the denouement where there
is the inevitable encounter between Pilgrim and the Saracen in Turkey.
Terry Hayes is an author, screenwriter and film producer
who started work as a journalist in New York.
He surely wrote I am Pilgrim with an eye to a film.
Here is a review by the New York Times which is not a plot-spoiler.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/books/i-am-pilgrim-by-terry-hayes.html
