Review of The Terrorist Next Door by Sheldon Siegel

This is a scary book—not in the Halloween sense but because it portrays our collective “worse nightmare” in post 9/11 America: a bomber right here “next door” as Siegel’s title says. A mysterious person, identified as “the young man” until the end, brings Chicago to its knees with fairly low-tech bombs, high-tech tools and carefully planned villainy. Bombs blow up all over town and the police are helpless for the longest time. See what I mean about scary? I lived in Britain when IRA bombings were still a fearful reality and certainly many parts of the world look over their shoulders in fear based on personal, up-close experience of terrorist bombings, but Americans tend to feel a little more distance and immunity. We worry, we remember 9/11, but I don’t feel a tremor of concern about explosions when I enter a parking garage or climb on a bus. Siegel may have changed that for me.

In The Terrorist Next Door the police follow the expected leads, searching for an Islamic extremist hiding out in America, but their quarry eludes them and the destruction mounts. Siegel examines the complicated issue of whether our tendency on all levels to view Muslims as possible terrorists serves us well as a nation. He brings a gripping twist to this problem.

Siegel provides a good balance to the nail-biting terror that his tale invokes: a sympathetic and well-developed police detective, David Gold, who goes up against the bomber with all his considerable intelligence and insight, but also with a large bundle of personal problems, traumatic past experiences, and a sagging love life. His partner, A.C. Battle, also engages our sympathies and our emotional involvement. Siegel gets us inside these men’s hearts and minds and skillfully increases our desperate desire for them to succeed and come out alive, especially Gold. Gold has already lost a partner to a fire-bomb detonated by a man named Hassan Al-Shahid, and his determination to stop another bomber never flags despite the challenges. Then things get really personal and completely unexpected and even more dangerous. I told you, this book is deeply scary. It’s a book that makes you think about our current political and social assumptions while ripping the pages along as fast as you can because you really need to find out how this all comes out.