Pursuit - Indy Quillen

If you're in the mood for a slightly unconventional thriller where rugged individuals with exceptional outdoor skills struggle against the odds to outwit the bad guys, some of whom may be working for government agencies, then 'Pursuit'may be just what you're looking for.

'Pursuit' is Indy Quillen's second thriller about Fox Walker, a Native American with extraordinary tracking skills. It happens six months after the end of the first novel,  'Tracker'.

 

'Pursuit' gave me not one but three rugged individuals who are good in the outdoors: an ex-Navy SEAL on the run, Fox who is called in by the FBI to pursue the SEAL but who begins to feel that he's hunting a man who doesn't deserve to be hunted, and Nataya, Fox's partner, who also knows how to live off the land and who, at the start of the novel is supposed to stay home out of harm's way but clearly isn't going to.

 

I settled down with it, expecting to spend a few hours reading and ended up finishing the whole thing in a day so that I could see how everything worked out.

 

Although most of this story is a detailed and very credible description of Fox's pursuit of the ex-Navy SEAL through the mountains, a lot of the tension comes from cross-cutting this with events elsewhere focused on figuring out what the FBI's agenda is and who really killed the woman the ex-Navy SEAL was convicted of killing. Both paths through the story have lots of threats and periods of intense, violent action and the overall resolution is quite satisfying.

 

This is an engaging thriller that gets its edge from the easy-to-believe-in descriptions of the tracking and survival skills that Fox and Nataya and the ex-Navy SEAL all have and by the way in which Indy Quillen highlights the different world views that drive how these skills are used.