On a drizzly morning in January 1984, Malcolm Kerr, the president of the American University of Beirut (AUB), was walking from the lift towards his office on the campus when he was shot dead. His two assailants escaped.

In 2020 Kerr’s widow Ann read Kim Ghattas’s book on Islamic extremism, Black Wave, and sent her an email:. ‘I would like to hear your thoughts about what lay behind Malcolm’s death. I wonder if you have more detailed information.’ Ghattas started hunting. Through the Kerrs’ and other stories she evokes the nauseous uncertainty of civil war Beirut – a place where people vanished and the Reagan administration came thoroughly unstuck.

At the beginning of the 1980s the Kerrs were living in California, where Malcolm taught at UCLA. He enjoyed shooting hoops in his backyard with their son Steve, who became a professional basketball player. They were the ‘quintessential picture-perfect American suburban family’, Ghattas writes. ‘But they were also outsiders, living between two worlds; they spoke foreign languages and cooked Middle Eastern dishes for dinner.’

When Kerr heard that AUB was searching for a new president he applied, even though Lebanon was in the middle of a civil war. He and Ann had met at AUB, where his parents had both been teachers. He had taught there as well. Before he got the job he told his daughter: ‘I figure there’s a 50-50 chance that I’ll get bumped off and that it will happen early on.’

Kerr was due to start on 1 July 1982, by which time Israel had invaded Lebanon and laid siege to Beirut. After David Dodge, AUB’s acting president, was kidnapped, Kerr was asked by the American ambassador to come as soon as possible. Navigating a poisonous atmosphere on campus, where sectarian loyalties now sharpened petty academic rivalries, Kerr took it upon himself to try to find his colleague.

Interestingly, word that he believed that Dodge was now in Syria or Iran reached the US Secretary of State George Shultz. We are not told how. Shultz swiftly warned the ambassador: ‘Further attempts to find Dodge will be dangerous.’ Kerr pressed on regardless. One of his colleagues asked the sister of an influential Shiite cleric if she could enquire about Dodge when she next visited Tehran. She did and, following Syrian pressure, he was released soon afterwards. Though long forgotten, Dodge’s abduction was ‘foundational’, Ghattas says, creating ‘a blueprint for hostage taking as a policy’.

In September 1983, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Beirut area, leaving the American and French peacekeepers who had been sent to prevent a massacre to face the consequences. Their governments were supporting Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, which saw an opportunity to get its own back in Beirut. After a suicide bomber killed hundreds of American marines, Reagan correctly believed the Iranians lurked behind the attack. The president had praised ordinary Americans’ moral courage, but his failure to sanction a reprisal looked to Tehran like weakness. After Kerr was killed weeks later, Reagan declared: ‘Terrorism must not be allowed to take control of the lives or actions of ourselves and our friends.’ In her telling of what happened next, Ghattas hammers home the hollowness of those words. Her stories of a trial, further abductions and a hijacking feel dislocated, but the details gradually make sense, revealing a remarkably small world.

A decade later, Kerr’s youngest son Andrew was working at the National Security Council in Washington when he came across a Reagan-era file about his father. It contained the transcript of an intercepted phone call in which one of the killers told the Iranian ambassador in Damascus what he had done. Again, Andrew’s colleagues in the US government warned against digging further. The file was classified, but eventually Andrew told his family what he had read. After other former hostages won a court case against Iran, the Kerrs successfully took legal action of their own. A State Department memorandum which was belatedly released as part of this process made clear that the US government knew who was responsible at the time.

Ghattas identifies the killers, one of whom may still be at large. But she has not been able to solve the mystery that has always dogged the Kerr family: why was Malcolm assassinated when other Americans were abducted? As she admits at the end:

Readers may have hoped for a definitive answer, but this is real life, where crimes often go unpunished, political expediency encourages impunity, and accountability is a Sisyphean endeavour – not just in Lebanon or the Middle East but worldwide.

It is rare that I keep on reading a book I am reviewing in bed. The Best Kind of American is twisty, dark and gripping, an all-too-real whodunnit.