Omar Shahid Hamid

Omar Shahid Hamid's life rivals the adrenaline-fueled roller coaster of his novel, The Prisoner. He left Karachi, Pakistan when there were too many contracts on his life. His father was assassinated. Hamid served with the Karachi Police and was targeted by various terrorist groups. He was wounded in the line of duty, and his office was bombed by the Taliban in 2010. He definitely has the background to write this book.

There are two separate storylines in The Prisoner: the current hunt for the kidnapped journalist, and the backstory showing Constantine D'Souza and Akbar Khan working together as police officers and Khan's subsequent imprisonment for a crime he didn't commit. The pace at the beginning was a bit slow and took some time to get moving, and occasionally the transitions between the two stories were muddled and it took me a few seconds to get myself straightened out, but these certainly weren't major issues. Although the story held my attention captive until its climax, that wasn't the most important part of the book for me.

The part that kept rocking me back on my heels was the portrait of Karachi. The differences between rich and poor. The fact that the police and government are so corrupt that policemen often have to break the law in order to get the worst criminals in prison where they belong. And-- great merciful heaven-- that labyrinthine, almost incestuous system of politics, military, and police! Most officials seem to be in their positions for the number of bribes they can rake in. It's all about the money (hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars) and has little to do with justice or doing what's right. It's all fascinating but not conducive to me journeying there any time soon.

I picked up The Prisoner because I wanted to know more about Pakistan. When I'd turned the last page, I knew that I'd gotten much more than I'd bargained for. What an experience, especially for a first book!… (meer)

This is the first of Pakistani author Omar Shahid Hamid's novels that I've read though I've been meaning to read them for a while now. Like his previous two novels this draws on his experience as a Karachi police official and was also written during the sabbatical he took for a few years after he had been put on a Taliban hit-list for his work as a senior member of the Counter-Terrorism Department. He has said that his next book may be a while coming since he's back on the job now and in charge of the intelligence unit of the CTD at their brand-new state of the art building in central Karachi (the previous one being blown up by a terrorist truck-bombing in 2010).

Unlike his first two books this one is less focused on the war on terror and more focused on Karachi's criminal and political landscape (the two have overlapped a great deal in the last few decades). While Hamid does not use the actual names of prominent personages, most people who have been following the city's news over the past few years will be able to figure out who most of the characters are meant to represent. (A few seem to be amalgams of two characters). Having said that this book could probably be read as a straight up crime and political thriller with no knowledge whatsoever of Karachi's history and politics. Though I suspect such a reader would have a hard time believing that many of the events depicted herein were actually based on real events and situations.

The story starts with a shooting in New York - an attempted assassination of a man named Asad Haider. Two NYPD detectives set about trying to figure out more about Asad Haider and why he was targeted. They soon discover his affiliation to a political party that dominates politics in Karachi and his background as a hit-man. The person who tried to have him killed is the same person he has served loyally for years - the 'Don'. The Don runs the Party and the teeming metropolis of Karachi from outside the country - having fallen afoul of various criminal, political and law enforcement elements before he judges it unsafe to return to the country and so lives in exile in New York where he and many of his cronies have been granted political asylum. He makes himself useful to the CIA by using his political and criminal influence in Karachi to counter the influence of the Taliban. The CIA soon show up and the investigation soon starts to be derailed. What follows is a sprawling, twisting tale which switches back and forth between Karachi and New York and back and forward in time as we learn more about Asad Haider, the Don, the history of the Party and a small group of concerned citizens in Karachi who hope to end the Party's influence forever. Their hopes rest on getting their hands on Asad Haider, who recovers from the shooting and is deported back to Pakistan from New York. But clearly he is a marked man as the Don is not going to let him live. And in the mean time in Karachi a gang war is brewing as a new criminal gang leader starts carving out his own bloody empire.

Perhaps whats most remarkable is that Hamid manages to create a certain sense of sympathy with the main character, Asad Haider (the titular Party Worker) even though he has been a ruthless hit-man and enforcer for the Party since its beginning and could even perhaps be considered a psychopath. This is even more remarkable an act of empathy by the author when one considers that his own father was murdered in the late nineties by a hit-man not unlike this character. In fact Omar Shahid Hamid has said in interviews it was that traumatic experience when he was still a student that played a role in convincing him to enter law enforcement as a career.… (meer)