A tome with the stature and heft of "The Year Of The Locust" is seldom pedestaled on bookstore shelves, but precious space is being cordoned off for the emplacement of a once-in-a-decade epic. It’s an imposing piece of literary sculpture, stately and solemn like Lincoln’s memorial. But simultaneously, exhilarating in its audacious scope and bold line, like Washington’s bright, white obelisk.

Everyone will be reading Terry Hayes’ thriller, a decade in the making. But fear not, you’ll easily join the coming viral mass-movement, drawn by pace, plot, and structure, to devour "The Year Of The Locust" in binges that obliterate any sensation of the earth’s rotation, the arc of the nuclear blast furnace of our yellow star, or the kids nagging for dinner.

Eight hundred pages will pass easily and inevitably like the blue waves on the crushed crystal sands of the gulf. The end will come too soon — complete, but teasing for more.

Hayes’ protagonist, Kane, is a Denied Access Area spy for the CIA. An operative in the most rarefied air. Adept at infiltrating forbidding landscapes, which host some of the world’s most austere totalitarian governments. Kane is a master spy and equipped by nature, and the CIA’s calculating nurture, he engages with the world’s most dangerous terrorists and assassins on their own turf. His mission is to penetrate the Iranian border and meet with an informant possessing information on a "spectacular" — a national security event on the scale of 9/11.

Having........

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