The Year of the Locust
Terry Hayes
Hardcover
ISBN: 9781668055786
Atria Books, February 2024, 784 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re exploring a twisty, tense spy thriller that takes its time getting to some unexpected places in The Year of the Locust, by Terry Hayes.

The Year of the Locust is told mainly from the perspective of CIA super spy Ridley Walker, one of the elite few Denied Area Access agents sent into the most dangerous situations on the planet, and right from the start does an excellent job of making Walker both personable as well as believable as a character. Tasked with rescuing an important source from deep within the chaotic borderlands of Afghanistan, Walker becomes involved in a globe-spanning chain of events that had me eagerly flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen next.

First off, I want to warn you—while I greatly enjoyed The Year of the Locust (otherwise I wouldn’t be recommending it), it reminded me a lot of Cryptonomicon (by Neal Stephenson), which, for those who have read that particular book, means you know indicates two things—there is going to be a wealth of highly obscure, carefully researched information, and that there are going to be a lot of pages. Thankfully, Hayes doesn’t go quite as deep into the rabbit holes on his information dives as Stephenson tends to, which for me kept the book extremely fast-paced while still providing a wealth of interesting real-life events that helped flesh out the story. Don’t get me wrong, this book is a hefty tome which will probably take you some time to finish, but it never felt like a slog to get through, and Hayes does an excellent job breaking up his chapters into digestible chunks that move the story along quite neatly.

That being said, I also want to say that I really enjoyed the level of care that Hayes put into the worldbuilding of The Year of the Locust. The CIA is presented as a complex, multi-faceted organization, and Hayes thankfully doesn’t allow his description to devolve into hagiography. Walker, as a spy, is fully aware of both the good the secret world can do, as well as the many times where that secrecy has been subverted towards darker ends, and Hayes drops in plenty of examples of the latter to balance out Walker’s penchant for the former. There are more than a few thorny ethical dilemmas that take place in The Year of the Locust, but Hayes does a good job avoiding simplistic jingoism as the answer to life’s problems.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a trigger warning here for those uncomfortable with scenes of graphic violence and torture, because there are some of those in this book. They’re handled well and never felt gratuitous, but be warned.)

The other thing I also really liked about The Year of the Locust is that it is a remarkably progressive book in a style of story that doesn’t usually tend that way. Ridley Walker, while a highly competent super spy, is no iron-jawed Hollywood action clone quipping off one-liners after mowing down the bad guys, but instead is a multi-faceted person dealing with the mental health aftereffects of his actions and desperately worried he’s out of his depth in situations that seem intractable. Still, at his core, Walker remains a good person trying to do the right thing, which really kept me invested in how his tale was going to end. Furthermore, Hayes does a wonderful job including little touches in both dialogue and worldbuilding that show this isn’t just a spy thriller concerned with catching the bad guy, but a study of how the world is changing and how it might keep changing in the future—one that recognizes the past, but is not necessarily compelled to repeat it.

Overall, there are a lot of other nice things I want to say about The Year of the Locust that I simply don’t have space to do so here, but I hope that you’ll give it a shot despite the initial imposingness of its length. It’s exciting, it’s thoughtful, and it takes some twists and turns that are wildly unexpected, but which all add up to an excellent read.

Read if: you’re a fan of Bond and Bourne but could do without the martinis; you know how many people can keep a secret; you’d punch the hell out of baby Hitler.