The Human Scale

October 1, 2024

Pulitzer Prize winner Wright (The End of October) offers a thriller featuring FBI agent Tony Malik, born of Irish and Arab parents. When he travels to Palestine for a family wedding, he is caught in the fraught investigation around the murder of an Israeli police chief; soon, events spin toward Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel. Prepub Alert.

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March 1, 2025
In Wright's latest topical novel, the murder of an Israeli police chief in a West Bank settlement inflames tensions, ultimately leading to the October 7 massacre. When FBI agent Tony Malik, whose father is Palestinian, travels to the historic city of Hebron to attend a cousin's wedding, he's still recovering from a bomb explosion that left him with erratic memory loss. His sense of disorientation deepens when, drawn into the investigation of the chief's murder--after having been falsely named a suspect--he encounters extreme forms of violence, hatred, and inhumanity on both sides of the conflict. Teamed with hardline Israeli cop Yossi Ben-Gal, he soon recognizes that anyone could have killed the police chief, whose pacifist leanings may have cost him his life. Asked whether he's worried about dangerous activities in Gaza, Yossi dismisses them as "some virus that pops up every few years, sometimes deadly, sometimes you hardly notice, like the difference between a cold and the flu." No one, including Malik, is safe in this hostile environment, where religious leaders financed by drug money call for the destruction of the enemy and a "human scale" determines the value of a life, as in one abducted Israeli being worth 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Lacking the deep literary expression of a Robert Stone, Wright falls short of capturing "the implacable darkness of human nature" (though he comes close in having the slain chief's missing head become a pawn in a deadly game), and he frequently slips into didacticism. But the book, based on the author's years of reporting in the region, is fully believable--and full of suspense. "What nobody outside understands is the real enemy is not each other," says one of many ill-fated characters. "It is peace we hate." A timely and gripping novel that works best as a political thriller.

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Starred review from March 1, 2025
After a bomb blast in Jordan in 2022 that cost him an eye, mobility, and mental clarity, FBI investigator Malik, who has never met his Palestinian father's family in Hebron, decides to attend his niece's wedding. The FBI grants him a small assignment--find out what the Jewish police chief is so anxious to tell them. After Malik's brief initial meeting with him, the chief is gruesomely murdered. Malik tentatively joins forces with the new chief, Yossi, a man of mixed messages, to investigate the killing, a quest that ends up affecting Malik's niece, her younger brother (a talented hacker), her fianc�, formerly with Hamas, and Yossi's brilliant daughter, Sara, visiting from Paris. Wright, a renowned journalist and novelist fluent in the paradoxes and tragedies of the Middle East, brings all his knowledge and compassion to this profoundly insightful thriller, creating involving, conflicted, and thoughtful characters trapped in horrific predicaments and a riveting story that reveals the deep trauma of Israelis, the brutality of the Israeli occupation, the fury and despair of Palestinians, the opposing religious convictions that stoke and sanctify perpetual violence, and the criminality that funds it. As the action leads inexorably to the October 7 Hamas attack and massacre, Wright considers the scale on which we weigh the value of human lives and the perpetual struggle for peace.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.