SOURCE: "Challenging the Acquiescence of Ulster," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 9, 1990, pp. 3, 10.

Eder is an American critic and journalist. In the following review, he praises Moore's suspenseful plotting in Lies of Silence but contends that some of his characters are underdeveloped and serve merely as political mouthpieces.

It is all there, perhaps too plainly there, in the title. Brian Moore has written an angry political novel that is also a novel of suspense. The suspense is intricately tangled in an impossible moral choice, faced by a Northern Irishman who struggles to resign from his country's conflict, and cannot.

Impossibility is the curse of the politics that has made Ulster's history a strangled gyre that grinds away, decade after decade, sinking but never sinking through. And it is the focus of Moore's anger.

Moore is a prolific novelist who has written on a variety of themes since...