THE SNARES

A debut espionage novel centered around Neel Chima, a former Naval officer and federal prosecutor, who is recruited to join a mysterious intelligent agencyone with greater-than-usual powers and fewer-than-usual restrictions. We are tossed into a delicate moment in history post 9/11 during the waning months of George W. Bush's presidency.

Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in the surveillance of domestic terrorism suspects and the selection of foreigners for drone assassinationmen who often resemble his own Sikh family. As he slips further into the job his feelings of ambition grow yet he has ambiguous sense of his morality. He soon starts pulling away from his wife and 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, even more radical counterterrorism missions. If he agrees, the world of power will open up wider to him, but if he chooses not to, danger seems imminent. As we start to feel Neel falling into a web of paranoia, we are not sure what he'll do, is he the hunter or the hunted? Rav Grewal-Kok has delivered a gripping and intelligent spy novel that will make you think of John le Carré meets Mohsin Hamid's EXIT WEST. An epitaph for the failed world on terror -- a rip from the headline's premise rooted in unforgettable characters with strong writing in a story that reveals an unsettling meditation on the great costs of power. Grewal-Kok's stories and essays have appeared in the New England Review, Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, The White Review, and elsewhere. He has won an NEA fellowship in prose and is a fiction editor at Fence. He grew up in Hong Kong and on Vancouver Island and now lives in Los Angeles.