Timothy taylor’s third novel, which revolves around a hostage crisis in an unnamed city, unfolds over three days at the end of October 2013. Although the year is not specified, the reader is alerted to the fact that the events take place on the eleventh anniversary of the Moscow Theatre Crisis, during which armed Chechen rebels took more than 850 theatregoers and staff hostage, in an attempt to force the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya. In Taylor’s novel, the hostage taker — who calls himself Mov, after Movsar Barayev, one of the leaders of the Moscow terrorists — is an erstwhile black ops soldier who specialized in breaking down prisoners in advance of interrogations. Mov, who clearly suffers from a kind of PTSD, commandeers a television studio where a reality talent show called KiddieFame is shot. As the situation (which comes to be known as the Meme Media Crisis) develops, crowds and riot police gather outside the studio, and the city threatens to erupt into chaos.

All of this serves as background for Taylor’s real concern, which is to tell the interlocking stories of three people whose lives are caught up in the crisis. Rabbit is a practitioner of a Parkour-like extreme sport called Freesteal, which involves infiltrating public spaces — rooftops, railway tunnels — and leaving behind subversive posters or other works of street art. Eve is an Olympic biathlon medallist desperately searching for her missing brother, Ali. And Thom Pegg is a disgraced journalist who was stripped of his Pulitzer when it became clear that he had invented a source for one of his stories.

These three characters form the creative counterpoint to Mov’s destructive impulses, and serve as the vehicles for Taylor’s examination of art’s potential to overcome fear and harm. This is rich thematic material, and Taylor takes care not to create simple binary oppositions, but also to illustrate how the various forces in the novel operate on a continuum. Pegg, for example, is the only person Mov will talk to; as their conversation proceeds, the reader becomes aware that unacknowledged philosophical similarities exist between the two.

Unfortunately, by foregrounding the relationship between Rabbit and Eve, which is essentially personal and not intimately connected with the hostage crisis per se, Taylor denudes the novel of much of its tension. The story of the hostage taking unfolds like a thriller, but the novel moves in fits and starts, its more action-oriented elements often forced to stand still while Rabbit and Eve engage in extended passages of personal rumination. The narrative fails to work up a sufficient head of steam, and consequently the riot it builds toward comes off as somewhat anticlimactic — a frustrating end to a novel in which there is plenty to admire.