The Snares

A Novel

By: Rav Grewal-Kök

Length: 10 hrs

Publisher's summary

A Punjabi American lawyer at a mysterious new federal intelligence agency fights to keep his career, marriage, and morality intact in this gripping post-9/11 drama from a thrilling new voice.

“Are you happy where you are? Toiling in the trenches of the Justice Department?”

In the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency, Neel Chima, a former Naval officer and federal prosecutor, is recruited to join a new federal intelligence agency—one with greater-than-usual powers and fewer-than-usual restrictions. Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in the surveillance of domestic terrorism suspects and the selection of foreigners for drone assassination—men who often look just like his Sikh family members. As both his ambitions and moral qualms mount, he is drawn further and further away from his wife and two 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, still more radical counterterrorism missions. If he agrees, the world of power will open up even wider to him. If he doesn’t . . .

Is Neel an insider or an outsider? The hunter or the hunted? An idealist or a mercenary? What truths, and whose lives, is he willing to sacrifice? The novel plunges listeners into the human turmoil behind the faceless operations—the torture, secret assassinations, and drone strikes—of the American security state, creating an eye-opening meditation on morality, violence, and the price of a human soul.

©2025 Rav Grewal-Kök (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Here is, at long last, our immigrant John le Carré. The Snares is a propulsive thriller that dives into our technological chaos, political deceptions, and transnational identities with fierce intelligence and wit. Rav Grewal-Kök is a fearless and visionary writer.”—Xuan Juliana Wang, author of Home Remedies

“Profoundly moving, harrowing, exactingly plotted—you could say Rav Grewal-Kök’s debut novel is pure literary thriller. You could also say The Snares is the chilling portrait of one man’s encounter with fate, an encounter which, like any encounter with fate, produces that thrill, that shiver between the shoulder blades Nabokov calls ‘the highest form of emotion humanity has attained when evolving pure art.’”—Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex