188. Title & Author: The Midnight House by Alex Berenson (481 pages) Genre: Fiction—Thriller
Completed: 4 July 2011
Summary & Review:
In a secret prison nicknamed “The Midnight House” hidden in a Polish forest, a ten-man joint Army-CIA team uses any means necessary to extract information from high value terrorists. But, upon their return home, members of the team are brutally murdered and CIA agent John Wells is assigned to find their killer. As Wells traces the murky history of “The Midnight House” he discovers that the team hid a secret that could shake the already tenuous bond between the United States and Pakistan.
This wasn’t the most patriotic of novels to finish on Independence Day. Berenson’s sympathies have been the subject of my complaints before (see The Silent Man, #163) and this novel continued his strange moral equivalence of American interrogation techniques and Islamic terrorism. Throughout the book the protagonist John Wells would make remarks about how he loved Islam and how simple it was and what great values it had, etc. But, the plot of the novel was filled with Islamist terrorists plotting and/or succeeding in murdering thousands of innocents and using Islamic teachings as their inspiration to do so. Too much of the book was spent criticizing American military and intelligence techniques and justifying Islamic terrorism. That doesn’t sit well with me.
Thank you to my lovely wife who gave me a Groupon to a local bookstore where I bought this book.
Rating: 6.5
Audiobook Update: I recently finished The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) by Robert Spencer. I found it to be quite enlightening. I also listened to The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith which was a forgettable novel set in post-Stalin, Soviet Russia. Finally, I also listened to The Broker by John Grisham and was disappointed to find that I didn't like it as much as I did when I read it the first time years ago.
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