A series of murders -- the description that this is somehow connected to a midterm election is misleading as party politics does not matter. The character are interesting, and the plot complex enough to make this both interesting and somewhat informative. But it dragged at the end and left me dangling (which may very well have been on purpose). ( )

R.J. Ellory’s new mystery, A Simple Act of Violence gives the reader a fictional (but all too believable) insight into the political workings of the D.C. justice system. Detective Robert Miller is pulled into what looks like a typical serial murder case — four women have been brutally murdered, and their killer has tied a ribbon around each of their necks. However, Miller discovers that all of these women had false identities, and the more he discovers, the more he’s pulled into a conspiracy involving the CIA and a team of hired political assassins.

Even though I don’t usually go for stories with a political edge, this story had me hooked from the first page — well written, plenty of suspense, and full of plot twists to keep even the most experienced mystery reader guessing. This is a highly entertaining intellectual exercise, and a book that I’m very much looking forward to rereading. ( )

A Simple Act of Violence is a book of two parallel stories, with the link between the two clear from the outset. In Washington DC a woman called Catherine Sheridan is killed. Police, in the form of Detective Robert Miller and his partner Al Roth, believe she is the fourth victim of a serial killer known as ‘The Ribbon Killer’. The second story thread is told from the perspective of the person we are to assume is the killer, a man named John Robey. In a series of (long-winded) chapters he talks about being recruited to the CIA and his his work for them in Nicaragua and other hot spots. One of his fellow CIA agents was Catherine Sheridan.

This book recently won the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year for being among other things ‘fascinating and surprising’. Do you ever wonder if you’ve read a different book from the one others are talking about? That’s how I feel about A Simple Act of Violence because I found it about as fascinating and surprising as breakfast.

In audio format the book is nearly 19 hours long (500 pages in its printed versions) but there is a startling lack of action for such a long tome. As far as the serial killer thread goes most of the victims are already dead by the time the book starts and we spend a chunk of time following Miller and his precinct buddies as they wander aimlessly down one dead-end after another. The few plot developments that do occur are telegraphed so far in advance that by the time they finally happen you think you’ve already read that portion of the book.

The traditional narrative chapters are interspersed with chapters where John Robey tells us everything wrong with American foreign policy from the 1980â€Čs onwards. I’ve read text books that were more compelling than these parts of the book. Not only is the content old news, effectively a re-hashing of the Iran-Contra affair and events surrounding American’s involvement in Nicaragua, but the story-telling method is dull and unbelievable. In my experience people do not lecture each other in day-to-day life but in John Robey’s experience everyone he met pontificated or lectured about something. Including people he was about to kill. Real people do not have the kinds of conversations that happened repeatedly during this book. It reminded me of those TV police dramas where two professionals who would both know exactly why a test is being conducted and what it will or won’t prove nevertheless explain the whole procedure to each other in words of two syllables or less because the writers can’t work out any other way to let viewers know what is going on.

To top it off there wasn’t a single interesting character in the book. Miller is an unmarried cop who’s had a nasty experience where his credibility was questioned. Ho hum. He wasn’t an alcoholic but most other cliché’s were covered. His sleepless nights, friendless days and obsession with a single case have all been done before and there was no new angle or character depth here to make me care whether he got some sleep, made a friend or found the killer. Nobody else, including the pontificating Robey, was any more engaging or believable to me.

In the end it felt to me as if this book didn’t know what it wanted to be. It didn’t have enough pace or twists to be an old-fashioned thriller, nor did it have enough heart to be a political exposĂ© pitting one man against his government. I wish I’d read a “fast-paced thriller, each page
[bringing:] about a new twist
” but I read a slow and largely predictable novel about people I will not be able to remember this time next week. ( )

An interesting story of what might have happened during invisible wars involving the CIA and why most of the nastiness would not have been published. ( )

“It is then that Catherine hears something. She thinks to turn, but doesn’t dare. A sudden rush of something in the base of her gut. Wants to turn now. Wants so desperately to turn around and look him square in the face, but knows that if she does this she will break down, she will scream and cry and plead for this to happen some other way, and it’s too late now, too late to go back
too late after everything that’s happened, everything that they’ve done, everything they’ve learned and what it all meant
Thinks: We gave ourselves the right. We gave ourselves a right that should only have been granted by God.”

Within moments of thinking this, Catherine Sheridan is dead, a victim of the Ribbon Killer, who has already killed three women. When the police arrive, they see all the signs – the ribbon tied around her neck, a blank, cardboard luggage tag attached, the room sprayed with the fragrance of lavender. But when Catherine is examined by the medical examiner, the police realize that Catherine’s death is different in a very significant way. Her killer did not kill the first three. There is a frightening possibility that there is a copy-cat searching out single women in Washington, DC.

Detectives Robert Miller and Al Roth are assigned to the case. A simple statement that means more than the words convey. Miller and Roth are assigned to bring Catherine Sheridan’s killer into a court of law where he can be tried and punished for taking her life. They do not know that their assignment is far more than they can understand.

When Miller and Roth look at the first three victims of the Ribbon Killer, it is obvious that the cases were not investigated diligently. The women are single, live quiet lives, and have no next of kin calling and demanding results. Robert Miller is a man who has no life beyond his job. Investigating on his own time, he learns that all the women had been screened for security clearance at sometime in their lives. He learns that none of the women existed before the date of the screening. The murder case he and Roth are assigned is so much more than the sum of its parts.

A SIMPLE ACT OF VIOLENCE is different than most of the books written in the recent past. It is at once a murder mystery, a thriller, and an indictment of politics in these United States. It is Oliver North, Iran-Contra, and Nicaragua. It is Reagan and the monster in everyone’s closet – communism, the Evil Empire, the world-wide plot to bring the United States to its knees.

This book is as much about John Robey as it is about Robert Miller. Robey is the voice that breaks the narrative, the words in italics used to explain what we didn’t know, what we didn’t want to know.

John Robey is CIA and so was Catherine Sheridan.

The CIA began as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II when Franklin Roosevelt realized that the information the US was receiving about the events in Europe were coming from Britain. The United States did not have an organization to seek out and disseminate clandestine information. Roosevelt placed the responsibility for the OSS in the hands of General “Wild Bill” Donovan. At the end of the war, Truman dismantled the OSS and it reappeared in 1946 to protect American interests outside its borders. The CIA was specifically prevented from running operations in the United States.

The CIA in A SIMPLE ACT OF VIOLENCE is the all-powerful, unchallenged organization with which we are familiar. John Robey is a veteran of clandestine operations and he is a cynic, a patriot without illusions. He tells the reader, “Richard helms, acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, once said in an address to the National Press Club, ” You’ve just got to trust us. We are honorable men.”
Captain George Hunter White, reminiscing about his CIA service, said, “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest.”
It’s a fallacy. You cannot have a corrupt and self-serving organization populated by people who are there for the very best reasons. People wind up in the CIA, and they either get with the program, or they understand what the program is and get the 
. out of there as fast as they can.”

Robey explains the difference between morals and ethics. Morals are the rules determined by society so that it can function without anarchy. Ethics determines how the rules are followed in a particular situation. Situational ethics belies the belief in law. The CIA exists to exploit or control a situation. John and Catherine were experts at the exploitation of men and nations in service of their country. When those skills brought them to Nicaragua in the eighties they were fully prepared to follow orders.

The United States began to lose its naivete with the assassination of John Kennedy. But twenty years later we were still willing to believe what we were told about being the only power that could prevent the world from falling to communism. The Sandinistas overthrew a dictatorial government and began a literacy program, the division of property to laborers, and the abolition of torture, movements that should have received the support of the United States. But Nicaragua allied itself with Cuba and when Reagan took office in 1981, the US actively backed the Contras. In exchange for sending drugs into the United States, the Contras got military hardware to battle the duly elected government led by the Sandinistas. Thirty years later, the tide of drugs into the US has not abated. Manuel Noreiga thanks us for our support.

The author writes concisely; the plainness of the language gives weight to the message. He describes the “sacred monster” the thing we create to further our purposes but which turns and devours us. He writes that there are, “Periods of American history considered unsafe to remember, events people pretended never occurred.” The CIA is the guardian of those secrets, “the best kept secrets are the ones that everybody can see” but that everyone ignores. Situational ethics encourages willful blindness.

This is a powerful book because it is a quiet one. Robey and Miller are talking about the movie “A Few Good Men.” Robey tells Miller , “What the movie was trying to communicate was the complete impossibility of preventing the bigger picture.

Catherine Sheridan’s death is not the prologue to the story. It is the postscript. ( )