No Way Out Reading Group Guide

Welcome to the Reading Group Guide for No Way Out. If you haven’t read the novel yet, save this list until you have finished it, because there’s spoiler information contained in the questions. 

1. The information presented regarding Amelia Bassano Lanier is true, even though the discovery of the annotated Midsummer Night’s Dream manuscript was fictional. Should the Shakespeare authorship issue matter? Does it matter to you if a woman wrote Shakespeare rather than the man named William Shakespeare?

 

2. Is DeSantos the kind of operative you would want on your side, working for your government, or do you consider that type of “black operative” an unnecessary and dangerous way of dealing with rogue leaders and treacherous terrorists?

 

3. Alan always attempts to make the setting a “character” in the novel. After reading No Way Out, did you want to visit London more, or less, than before?

 

4. Did you get a sense of the differences between American society and British society?

 

5. Should Rudenko’s plot, and Vail’s and DeSantos’s roles in its solution, be disclosed to the public?

 

6. Is it good, or bad, to have a city as well-covered by CCTV cameras as London is?

 

7. Would you like to see Vail pair up with DeSantos again in a future novel? (If so, please email Alan and tell him!)

 

8. Should “enhanced interrogation” be used in high pressure, time-stressed situations on high-value terrorists when an attack might be imminent? Or is this a line that should never be crossed, no matter the situation?

 

9. The SP-117 drug is arguably a form of enhanced interrogation, though theoretically no harm is done to the suspect. Do you feel it is right to use such a drug on a terrorist to obtain information crucial to national security?

 

10. Is the UK’s policy of not arming its police officers a good idea, or not?