Book Review: Act of Treason by Vince Flynn

During the heat of a presidential election a terrorist group in the Middle East threatens violence to try to influence the results. Some weeks before the election is to take place a car bomb goes off near one of the presidential candidate’s motorcades and kills the wife of the presidential candidate and dozens of innocent bystanders. The voters decide that they won’t be pushed around by terrorists and vote in the presidential candidate who was attacked. Mitch Rapp and his friends at the CIA are left to uncover the plot. Sounds like a great thriller, but Act of Treason is not up to the standard we expect from Vince Flynn.

Flynn deserves a lot of credit for an almost prophetic handle on the continuing war on terror. Before the 9/11 attacks he had written novels about militant Wahhabism attacking the United States. While on the book tour for his last book, Consent to Kill, Flynn talked about secret CIA prisons where Iraqi and Afghani insurgents and terrorists were interrogated outside the view of the public eye. A year later there were stories in the popular press about those same secret prisons.

The author has been a bestseller thanks to his research and his connections to U.S. servicemen out in the field. He combines his solid research with a great storytelling ability, which typically makes all of his novels thrilling page-turners.

Act of Treason, however, abandons some of the formulas that have worked so well for Flynn in the past. He plays around with different themes. In his past works there was the “ticking time bomb” mentality, which has driven much of the motivations for the protagonist Mitch Rapp. Flynn also tries to tackle the controversies that plague presidential administrations as they close, especially presidential pardons. In fact, much of the plot of the book involves pardons in a thinly veiled discussion of all the last-minute pardons of the Clinton Administration.

Article Author: Marty Andrade

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