EVERY NOW AND THEN — but a lot more rarely than that implies — you come across a thriller so important that it absolutely demands to be read. This is one.

Richard North Patterson is another of those John Grisham-inspired American lawyers who decided that he would rather earn money the hard way, by writing fiction. He emerged on the serious legal-thriller scene more than a decade ago with a series of successful but schmaltzy courtroom dramas with traumatic love stories at their heart.

His recent books, however, have taken a more political stance, drawing on such contentious issues as abortion, US gun laws, the death penalty and now, most controversially of all, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It is easy to sense the author’s own trepidation in his extensive notes that all but apologise for using the words “Palestinians” and “Occupied Territories”.

“Some Israelis,” he says (and you cannot help but feel that he also means a lot of Americans) “would argue that the ‘Palestinians’ are not a people and that the West Bank . . . is God’s biblical grant to the Jewish people and therefore cannot be ‘occupied’.”

It is to his credit that he goes to such lengths to address precisely such prejudices, and to tackle the seemingly equally implacable hatred for Israel among many Arabs. The book begins with David Wolfe, an up-and-coming defence attorney-turned-Democrat politician on the verge of a career apotheosis: marriage to a wealthy Jewish trophy wife and an assured seat in Congress.

Enter an unquiet ghost from his past: Hana Arif, a bright, liberated but conservative Palestinian woman. She was briefly his lover at university but is now the wife of a radical Islamist with links to Hamas, who is shadowing the visit of an Israeli prime minister with a controversial peace plan rejected by extremists on both sides. Shortly after delivering his keynote speech, the Israeli premier is assassinated in a suicide bombing.

Inconceivably to David, the forensic evidence and testimony of one bomber who survived points to Hana as the assassins’ handler. Deprived of contact with her sensitive adolescent daughter and facing the death penalty, her only chance is to turn to David.

Despite his doubts and the collapse of his marriage and career plans, he takes up the task, only to be drawn into the morass of hate, lies, murder and subterfuge that epitomise the Middle East conflict.

Haunted by his own Jewish identity, and his concealed relationship with Hana, he visits Jerusalem and the West Bank in search of an almost unobtainable truth and ends up intimately moved by what he uncovers.

Patterson has done stupendous research, is admirably level-headed, eschews sermonising and patronising. Now, more than ever, as this conflict holds the world to ransom, this is a thriller that deserves to be a bestseller.

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