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One of my favorite characters, Paul Brenner, is back from one of my favorite authors. Having pissed off the brass in his last case, see The General's Daughter, Paul has been forcibly retired having pissed off a lot of brass His former boss, Colonel Helden, calls him up for a meeting at the Wall where he presents a most interesting proposal. They have a letter from a witness who says he say an army captain shot an army lieutenant in cold blood during the Tet offensive in Vietnam. The army wants the killer identified and punished. So Brenner, in return for a bigger pension and reinstatement, must solve a case that has no body, no apparent motive, no accused, no witnesses except for the letter, a witness who may have died years before, a witness who happens to have been NVA, a killer who may even be dead; a murder that may not even be a murder and which occurred during the midst of a heated battle over thirties years before. Not to mention that the dead man’s name is inscribed on the Wall and his relatives and friends all assume he was killed in battle.
Things are never what they seem, and Brenner learns from his FBI briefing just as he is about to embark on the trip to Vietnam to find the NVA witness, assuming he is still alive, that there are many things the army CID and FBI would rather he not know, but he suspects they want him to locate the man so they can kill him. Just his cup of tea.
Once in Vietnam, Paul meets Susan. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, etc., except that Paul suspects that Susan, who ostensibly works for the Bank of America on trade issues, might also have a connection to the CIA. She and he travel together, her knowledge of Vietnam proving to be invaluable and Paul begins to put some of the pieces together.
Many of the Demille books I have read exist on several levels. One suspects that this book is a much a personal meditation on the war that DeMille served in as an infantry lieutenant. Some of the stories that Paul recounts to Susan are just too real. I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read about our nation’s coming to terms with our Vietnam experience