I Am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes

I will start out by holding my hands up and admitting that I didn't give this book quite the attention I should have. My excuses being that it is a 700 page hardback that puts a brick to shame. It was not a commuter-friendly choice, but I was far too keen to wait the extra few months for the paperback to come out (I think I've now learnt my lesson about patience). Therefore, my perfect excuse to read it was a cottage holiday with the family for a week in Cornwall. I had high ambitions to finish it in the week, but *insert excuses here* I got about half way through before I had to return to handbag-compatable reads in London. That was about 3 months ago and shamefully I rarely found opportunity to pick it up again until last week when I decided it was time. The mistake I made was stopping at the point where the story dipped slightly and so I didn't have much compulsion to keep at it. The first 400 pages took me a week months ago, the latter 300 pages took me an evening. It turned out that good.

Do not be fooled by the length it took me to read this - all you need to do is read all of the reviews on Goodreads (of which majority are 5*s) to see that I am definitely in the minority, most people couldn't put it down and I genuinely believe if I'd been reading it on my commutes, I too would have read it solidly from cover to cover in a week or 2. 

Plot:
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.
(Goodreads)

It is a great book. It is extremely clever, it is one thing to mention one of the most exceptional, infallible detectives/secret agents, but to actually create this character and plot line with every detail as to why he is the best is something else.
The book starts off pacey - there's been a murder, it has been considered and planned down to the last detail to make it near impossible to solve. We're intrigued. It then skips off to a whole other plot line, which is the main, dominating purpose of the book, following an extremist trying to destroy the human race for the sake of his religion. This is when it gets clever. Again the details are so precise that it's a wonder a reader couldn't recreate it themselves in real life (fingers crossed they won't) - not many books go in to the detail of terrorism, not only from the action side of things but into the person's past and present mind. This makes it exceptional to read and really intriguing. However, it goes into so much detail and back story that it becomes quite long. This was the point where my holiday ended and I put down the book for a while - I couldn't yet piece together the connection between the beginning sequences and the middle back story and so it became easy to stop reading.

I recently read S J Bolton's review on this book and she sums up exactly how I felt: "It was interesting enough, well-written enough to hold my attention, but not the epic, race against time, most thrilling thriller ever written I’d been hoping for. 
It gets there – Oh, my, but it get’s there – it just doesn’t do it fast."
She says it - it gets there, it just takes its time about it, and having read it now, why shouldn't it? About 50 pages further from where I stopped (if only I had preserved a little more), there is suddenly revelations that blow things out of the water; the pace suddenly accelerates into overdrive, pieces start to fall into place and the timer starts ticking down very fast.The ending pulls it together perfectly, it leaves no burning question unanswered and does so in a way that you won't want to stop thinking about it.

As I said, I wish I had given this book more attention initially that I know it definitely deserved and I am pleased to hear that the film rights have been bought too. It is made for the big screen - they may have to condense it down some, but it will make a block buster!
Plus it means I can force the story upon my friends who would not be interested in reading such a hefty book!