Review: A Quiet Vendetta

Ellory blends fact and fiction in his latest work to re-tell the story of organised crime in America and how the criminal underworld interacted with the changing face of American politics right up to present day. In some ways it reminded me a little of Robert Littell’s masterwork ‘The Company’ which retold the history of the CIA through a series of vignettes blending real people with fictionalized characters creating a kaleidoscopic vision in which it is impossible to discriminate reality from make-believe. Ellory’s ‘A Quiet Vendetta’ ploughs a similar furrow, telling the story of how organised crime seeped into, and altered US society to what it is today.

Ellory’s style is to tell a tale in a conversational style, something he developed from his previous novels ‘Candlemoth’ and ‘Ghostheart’, but this time his style is more polished and his writing much darker, because there is dreadful violence in the story, and the reason for the dread is that it comes from the banal and deadpan attitudes of the killers who lie at the heart of the underworld. In Ellory’s world we see people who kill purely because [a] they can, and [b] because they are driven to murder as a profession.

The story starts conventionally enough with Detective Verlaine of the New Orleans PD investigating a dead body found in the trunk of a car. The murder was extremely brutal, with the victim having a carving painted on his back, the constellation of Gemini. The murder appears to send a signal, a warning perhaps? The first problem is that the body is identified as the ‘minder’ who was looking after a nineteen year old woman - Catherine Ducane who is now missing. The second problem is that the missing woman, is the daughter of Charles Ducane – the Governor of Louisiana.

Soon FBI agents descend upon the case wrestling it from Verlaine, and unexpectedly a man named Ernesto Perez contacts the investigation team and tells them that he has Catherine Ducane and wants to cut a deal, but he wants to speak to a down-on-his-luck state attorney named Ray Hartmann. The FBI trace Hartmann and bring him into the investigation and even more unusually, the kidnapper Ernesto Perez turns himself in. What he won’t tell the investigation team is where the young woman is being kept, or how long she has to live – that is until he is allowed to tell his tale which forms the backbone of this gripping narrative.

Perez’s tale is unraveled like the skin of a banana, peeling strips at a time. We soon learn more about the world that Perez has lived in - a brutal world in which he evolved into a psychopathic enforcer and hit-man for the underworld. We see how Cuba and it’s politics infected America, we see Castro, we see The Kennedy’s, we see the rise of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, we see how the tendrils of organised crime pervade the pillars of influence, and how power corrupts and most frighteningly, we see how evil can rule the world. There are images in this book that are terrifying, stomach-churning right from Perez’s first killing; the random and amoral attack on an encyclopedia salesman, but soon his appetite for murder becomes something that develops until it becomes part of his reason to live, even when his murderous profession impinges on his family. The puzzling aspect throughout the novel is why Perez wants to tell his story to Hartmann? A question that is not addressed until the very end, and one that solves a horrific image that still lingers in my head and one that I find makes me feel physically sick when I think of it. The journey that Hartmann has to endure is perhaps preordained, perhaps it his way to find redemption for his own darkness.

The novel is written with thickly textured descriptive passages which one loves to savor because of the literate nature of the prose, and the pictures the book paints in your head. Some of the pictures I have problems erasing, because many of them are sickening. The literary style conflicted with my mind screaming ‘get on with the story’ because the story makes you impatient - because a young girl’s life hangs in the balance, and you desperately want to find out why Perez is teasing Hartmann and the investigators with his life story.

Beautifully written, this is a novel to get lost in, a novel to savor and one that is a long ride into the darkness, and if you recall reading Mario Puzo’s The Godfather as a teenager [as I did], then this powerful book will make you relive that memory – Masterful but beware of the brutality, because it comes out of the most literate prose I have read for many years.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Ali Karim - RAM

Book Review: A Quiet Vendetta