A Simple Act of Violence

This is a book with everything that a fan of modern mystery fiction could hope for; a labyrinthine plot, unbearable tension, controversy and a social conscience. R J Ellory has come up with a meaty book where he takes a serial killer novel and shapes it into a barbed comment on American foreign policy and a criticism of the God complex of the CIA. That he does this while never dipping on the entertainment value is a compliment to this writer’s consummate skill.

'A 600-page blockbuster that twists two stories together into a real headache for harrassed homicide detective Robert Miller, and it confirms Ellory's breakthrough book, A Quiet Belief in Angels, was no fluke. 9/10'

'A fast-paced and wonderfully constructed plot'

THIS writer knows how to hook a reader.

The first five pages of his big Washington, DC, novel, A Simple Act of Violence, left me breathless, gasping; not an easy thing to do in a hardened crime reader who believed he had anaesthetised his sensibilities to such things.

R.J. Ellory is the English author of five previous novels, including the captivating bestselling thriller A Quiet Belief in Angels, who despite living in Britain has convincingly set all his books in the US.

In the first short chapter, Ellory forces us to track the progress of a character towards her murder, which takes place to the soundtrack of the classic Frank Capra movie It's a Wonderful Life. It's a virtuoso set-piece opening to a compelling whistleblower of a crime book seemingly based in fact: quite breathtaking in the way Ellory edges the truth into fictional shapeliness to heighten some big moral issues.

Catherine Sheridan, a woman with a passion for odd-coloured berets, takes a DVD from a bookcase, opens the player, pushes buttons and waits for Dimitri Tiomkin's music. She hears the tolling bells and then the playful strings section melody and watches snow falling in a picture postcard street. Then, just as Jimmy Stewart croons, "Well, hello", she dies.

Ellory initially establishes Sheridan as assenting to her demise, even responsible for what happened to her. Possibly a killer herself, she is a self-appointed victim. Her last thought: "I'm not the one who has to go on living with the knowledge of what we did."

Quickly, we become less concerned with the solution to a puzzle than the death of a person, someone who sees the whole of her life collapse like a concertina and then sees it drawn out again until every fragment and fraction can be clearly identified. What was this life like? Who is the "we" she is thinking of as she dies and what did they do together?

Usually in detective fiction what matters is the solution of the mystery and why it happened, but here the prime interest quickly becomes the effect of the crime on the victim.

And only then on the grim young detective, Robert Miller, for once a fictional cop who has no collection of smart one-liners, a man of unremarkable appearance, darkness in his head.

Suddenly Miller and his partner, Albert Roth, are investigating the murders of four women in eight months, Sheridan the latest, apparently the work of a serial killer. (Though maybe not, because copycats seem to be lurking in Washington's shadows, sharp corners and blunt edges.)

An unstoppable sense of inevitability pervades the case. Names don't match social security numbers and the victims have no pasts; police sergeants with fictitious addresses have disappeared; photos are discovered beneath carpets, shreds of newspapers under mattresses.

And, drenched in lavender, each victim has a ribbon tied around her neck, rather like the tag you find suspended from the toe of a body in the morgue.

Miller is a quiet man who has committed himself to a life of asking questions and waiting for answers, who habitually carries an expression as if he is trying to absorb something he can't see. He knows there must be a connection that runs through it all, straight as a ruler. But he's so busy looking at what's around it that he can't see what's in front of him.

Soon, a new voice interrupts the police narrative, a thought process italicised in the text, a hard-bitten, interior monologue that begins just behind the beleaguered investigation, then slyly anticipates it.

The voice speaks of AR 15s, .223s and .22 calibre rounds; of snipers' camouflage suits, hollow point bullets, garrotte wires and how to kill someone with a rolled-up magazine.

And later, as Miller's investigation becomes more confused, the thought stream is about sanctioned assassinations in Reagan-era America, the way the CIA sold drugs in Los Angeles in the 1980s and used the profits in its war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government.

Ellory then painstakingly and with furtive craft (you keep wondering how he can bring this off) develops three seemingly incongruent scenarios. Seamlessly, he interweaves these serial murders in the Washington of George W.Bush's presidency with the deceitful, Machiavellian horror created in '80s Central America.

And then he intertwines them with a conspiracy orchestrated by clandestine sections of US government agencies. "We live in a fragile state of transparencies," the former agent who might be the Ribbon Killer tells Miller. "Something that appears one way is almost certainly something else."

The detective discovers he is dealing with what the French call a sacred monster, something that the creator regrets having created, something capable of massacring hundreds of innocent people in the name of democracy and flooding the streets of the US with crack cocaine.

"The best-kept secrets are the ones that everyone can see," one of Miller's friends, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, tells him.

Ellory creates a world in which guilt and innocence become problematic, where the presence of the detective simply cannot guarantee the rationality of the world and the integrity of the self, as in conventional detective novels.

Written in simple, unaffected prose that makes you think of the swell and fall of a good sentence as you read, it's unputdownable, an example of what genre critic Jacques Barzun calls "stories of anxiety", which cater for the contemporary wish to feel vaguely disturbed. Ellory plays with the procedural story's conventions, throwing them out of kilter, and keeps the problem of guilt and complicity, of menace and conspiracy at the front of the reader's thinking.

Ellory says he doesn't write crime but human dramas where the characters continually find themselves challenged by viewpoints and realities that are emotionally difficult as well as mentally untenable.

They find themselves in places where they never intended to go and do not wish to remain. Their purpose becomes to recover their lives and identities; failing that, they recover whatever they can but never view life from the same perspective.

Ellory challenges a facade of morality and legality that appears to be so rotten that a disturbing vision lies behind it, and expresses a deep uncertainty about the adequacy of traditional social institutions to meet the needs we have for security and justice.

As Miller thinks to himself at the end of it all, the sacred monster has not yet given up all its secrets.

Graeme Blundell, The Australian

Spy thriller and noir detective tale rolled into one. What first appears the work of a proficient serial killer gets a new dimension when investigation of the victims'  backgrounds reveal they all have false identities. A rogue assassin rediscovers conscience, CIA machinations despoil government and judiciary, and the ghosts of bad ops past in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile et at return to spook the spooks. Cleverly

crafted and saturated with suspense, this one has more coils than an anaconda.

Qantas Magazine

This summer's impressive batch of thrillers takes the global 'War on Terror' as a theme, and each book gives it a very different treatment. In this hefty offering (it's a satisfying 600 pages), British writer R J Ellory melds the crime and thriller genres to page-turning effect. Washington cop Detective Robert Miller is assigned to the case of four seemingly unrelated women murdered by a serial offender dubbed the 'Ribbon

Killer'. To track the culprit down, Miller must try and identify how the victims are related, and what the killer's motivation could be. His investigation leads him to a particularly inglorious episode in American history: the CIA's involvement in Nicaragua in the 1980s, a scenario that could be said to have much in common with the current situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Weekend Australian

If you like your thrillers complex, mufti-layered and honed to a sharp political edge, A Simple Act of Violence will keep you engrossed. Robert Miller, a Washington detective already under a professional cloud, attends a murder scene to find a woman, beaten and strangled, a ribbon around her neck. It is a replica of other unsolved brutal murders in the US capital. This is the underbelly of political Washington – not the city of gleaming white national monuments, but the town of dangerous tenements and sordid deals in crack-cocaine. Ellory's tale, however, shows how those two worlds intersect in a densely woven narrative that pits the weary but dogged Detective Miller

against a mysterious professor of literature, John Robey. As the latest murder prompts Miller to look again at the earlier, unsolved cases, he comes up with loose ends and discovers none of the dead women can be positively identified, He becomes haunted by the sense that "there was so little he knew and so many people who knew more".

Robey, meanwhile, is musing on "the company" – aka the CIA – an "unprejudiced force for order and stability".  Even as he preaches to his university students the importance of integrity in literature, he recalls his own past as a CIA operative in Nicaragua, and we get clues that reveal the nature of his relationship with the latest murder victim. Catherine Sheridan. Inevitably, Miller and Robey come face to face. And slowly we discover that just as America’s poorest and most vulnerable can become addicted to crack cocaine, so its elite can become addicted to power and manipulation. "There is no question of rightness or wrongness when it comes to the security of a nation," one character observes. Ellory asks us whether we really believe that, or whether we believe in the possibility of decency in an indecent world.

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