THE HUMAN SCALE

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.