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The Poet Game is the kind of debut that did not get the attention it deserved in 2000 and that hits differently after 9/11. Salar Abdoh, an Iranian-born writer who came of age in New York, wrote a thriller about a young Iranian intelligence officer sent to New York to surveil an exiled cleric who has been organizing opposition to the Tehran government. The cleric is not who he appears to be. Neither is the officer.
Abdoh writes the New York Iranian-diaspora community with the kind of insider attention that almost no Western thriller of the period was offering. The Persian-language cafes, the cleric's mosque, the family relationships that take three generations to explain, all carry weight. The intelligence procedural is solid. The prose is unusually elegant for the form.
The ending is melancholy in a way that the thriller form rarely allows. Four stars. Recommended to readers who want their international intelligence fiction less mythologized and more lived-in.
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