Very Bad People: The Inside Story of Our Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption by Patrick AlleyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is an interesting one. I think Very Bad People does some things really well, and some things not-so-well. In between these things, it tells this powerful story about corruption in the real-world that is important, urgent, and demands attention. It is terrifying, exciting, and fun to read, all at the same time, which is a feat of its own.
What Very Bad People does well is build these mini-narratives, chapter after chapter, consistently interesting and varied. Each chapter deals with a different case, and it's almost framed like a mystery, and it comes together as the chapter progresses. You want to know what happened, you want to know if the bad guys were caught, if the cases were won, if the report was ignored or if it set the nation on fire. You keep reading because what is being said is interesting, and on a structural level the book puts it in an engaging structure.
What it doesn't do well is the actual writing. The actual writing is just a little bit off. It flirts with being a book of mystery stories, but they're never actually mysteries because you never really get given the tools needed to piece together clues. Some parts of the book are dense and difficult to get through, some parts are boring because of the way they are written. It's not "I can't read this" bad, but I wouldn't have finished it if the subject matter had been less powerful or fascinating. In addition, it's easy reading. It's not the kind of bad that makes a book impossible to comprehend, instead it's just bland with some hints of strange flavourings.
It's easy-reading though, and the actual content is fantastic. No reason to not pick it up.
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