I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

by:  Terry Hayes
published by:  Atria
publish date:  May 27, 2014

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.

That's a really long synopsis I know!  The book is really long.  I kind of have an aversion to really long books because I hate investing a lot of time only to find out that I really don't care for the book or the ending isn't very good or something else goes wrong with it.  Fortunately, I took a chance on I Am Pilgrim and it paid off.  Everything was perfect about this book.  It was a thriller of every kind:  political, police procedural, medical, espionage...it was all in there.

It's hard to kinda sum up this book and talk about what it was about because it had so many elements and twists and turns.  That makes it sound like it would be confusing, but it wasn't.  It was very well planned out and outlined so that it was easy to follow and keep track of what was going on.  That's pretty hard when the book is getting well into 700 pages and the story is bouncing all over the planet.  

I'm beyond impressed with Terry Hayes, it looks like while he has been writing for awhile, this is his first novel.  Great job!  I can't wait to read the next one!!