SOURCE: "Held Hostage," in Canadian Literature, No. 132, Spring, 1992, pp. 184-86.

In the following review, Dahlie praises the suspenseful plotting in Lies of Silence and commends Moore's insistence that individual moral choices produce social consequences.

[Lies of Silence is] a masterful novel of suspense, in which individuals' moral crises are convincingly tied in with the social, political, and religious conflicts that have beset Ulster, seemingly forever. Moore has exploited these issues in many of his earlier works, but in Lies of Silence the protagonists do not merely suffer or endure these bigotries: they are forcibly conscripted into the terrorist activities that these behavioural patterns make inevitable. By playing on the connotations of the title words, Moore shows how an ordinary individual gets caught up in this dilemma: "Dillon felt anger rise within him, anger at the lies which had made … [Belfast] sick with a terminal illness of bigotry and...