Impeccably researched ... Informative ... Ball has written an exceptionally erudite and detailed history of assassination, packed with research drawn from government archives across the world.
This is a big subject and Ball does well to cover as much as he does. But there should be more to come, especially a detailed analysis of the political and moral effectiveness of assassination as a tactic or strategy.
Ball’s book suffers from being too broad and too shallow. He treats assassination as any murder for a political purpose, which is reasonable enough in theory but gives him a vast number of incidents to examine ... His analysis is light ... A deeper exploration of case studies would have brought us closer to understanding why assassinations became so common in some places and not others ... The book comes closest to this in its discussion of assassination policies by democracies.
