Review: Excellent! Whodunit that forces you to think!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 2, 2013
This book was top of the line albeit sometimes its message was a tad uncomfortable. It involves two timelines, one detailing protagonist Ari's (let's call him that) life in wartime Iraq and one covering his work in the US, having been brought over to work for CENTCOM (the US Central Command}. He is moved into a house in Richmond, VA, given a minimum allowance and a computer (monitored by the US Marshall's Service), a desk, a table and a a few chairs. His job is to go through photos of people committing atrocities and identify the perpetrators and if possible, the victims, too. His background in Saddam's Special Security Force and his near photographic memory make him especially suited to this job. Since all the people he can identify can also identify him and aptly consider him a serious threat, they have done their best to do away with him, hence the quick transfer to the US, where he is "safer."On moving into the Richmond house he learns that a family of four including two children was murdered there a few months previously and that amazingly little has been done to track down the killer or killers. Ari is exceedingly well trained, excels as an investigator, and he is curious. When he digs up a drug dealing thread and follows it, he becomes a target once again, this time being hunted by Americans.In the meantime, Ari keeps seeing parallels between democracy in the US, peppered with do's and don'ts and subtle ways of coercing adherence, and the autocratic dictatorship in Iraq with its much more direct and brutal response to deviants. The book was wonderful but scary! It certainly deserves to be read!