The Spinner’s Tale by Omar Shahid Hamid
In a desolate corner of the Nara Desert in Pakistan, two kilometers from the border with India, an upcoming superintendent is handed over the most feared Jihadi militant Sheikh Ahmed Uzair Sufi for safekeeping. When the superintendent Omar Abassi also receives a letter written by the Jihadi to his best friend Eddy, he begins to investigate. Are these letters only about the shared love of cricket and a detail of what the two friends are engaged with in different parts of the world? Or are the letters a code for terrorist activities and planning ?
Omar sees Sheikh Uzair as his ticket to fame, his silver bullet. If he can decode the letters between Ausi and Eddy,(that Sheikh Uzair willingly tells him the location of), Omar could be transferred out to CID, and become an elite jihadi hunter. What made young Ausi, a cricket loving student of the elitist The School become a terrorist – a brutal person who beheaded a pregnant western journalist on camera?
We discover Ausi become Sheikh Uzair with Omar. Ausi’s mother is Kashmiri and he engages wholeheartedly with Kashmir’s military endeavours against the Indians. He is captured and suffers horrific torture at the hands of the Indians but he becomes a force to be reckoned with! We feel pain at the way he is sodomised and treated during his incarcerations. We watch the smooth talking Sheikh lull the pregnant journalist into a false sense of security before he beheads her and how he eases a young jihadi into becoming a suicide bomber. You never quite get a sense of what drove Ausi to become Sheikh Uzair, but the transformation is smooth and brutal, and you see a master spinner at work!
The Spinner’s Tale is a fast paced thriller that had me riveted throughout. Spoiler alert – the end of the book will stun you!!
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