The thriller genre used to feed off the Cold War. More recently, the ‘bad guys’ have tended to come from terrorists, Islamists, etc., and in most cases I’ve found such books to be excruciatingly shallow. The Good Son, seventh novel from thriller writer Michael Gruber, provides a welcome whiff of intelligence in the genre, for it offers as nuanced a drama set in terrorist-dominated remote Pakistan as John le Carre did of the Cold War in his Smiley series. Cerebral adventurer and academic Sonia Laghari, estranged from a high-class Pakistani husband, is taken hostage in remote Pakistan with a group of other academics. Her son Theo, a brutally efficient American spy warrior, attempts a rescue. All this sounds like one of those crap modern American thrillers, but by making his two central characters very much semi locals (Sonia practises Islam as well as Catholicism and Theo had a period as a Pakistani soldier), and by enmeshing the hostage/rescue story in a US espionage imbroglio, Gruber deepens the book into something illuminating. The author is not a stylist like le Carre but his writing is spirited and his plotting is terrific. I found the ending both surprising and a little bit rubbery, but none of this detracted from reading enjoyment.
The Good Son is a classy thriller built on a rare foundation of intelligence. 3 stars.