In the Shadow of Violence uses a framework previously developed by Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast in previous work to nine developing countries to illustrate how political control of economic resources is used to limit violence and coordinate coalitions of powerful organizations.
The central idea of the book is that development is difficult, not because politicians are socially and morally bankrupt, but that economic institutions are manipulated in the attempt to provide stability and political order. Politicians end up spending so much money on these socially constructed low-access orders that there's little left for development.
While the ideas themselves are intriguing, this book reads as though it was intended for upper level graduate students, rather than the general readership. I often had to stop just to figure out if what I read made any sense and/or reread sections.
This book is not for the novice or someone who dabbles in political economy/development politics. What I do look is that all of the case studies seem to correspond nicely to the framework outlined in the front of the book: going from the least developed to most developed countries they include.
Though the cases themselves were interesting, this reader often found themselves lost in verbiage.