The General

A former Air Force major offers a military thriller involving a colonel whose investigation into the brutal murder of a general reveals a conspiracy stemming from the Vietnam War and presents him with a serious moral dilemma. A first novel. 100,000 first printing.

Routine military whodunit set in the dusty warrens of the Pentagon, from a former Air Force major. Shortly after putting the dinner dishes in the sink, Colonel Charlie Jensen, a contented family man who is also commander of the Air Force's P-Directorate, an elite criminal-investigations unit that handles only the highest profile cases, gets a phone call. The corpse of Air Force General Watkins, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been found at home in his study, his skin brutally slashed in a torture-style execution commonly used many years ago by the Vietcong. Though he would normally lead the investigation, Jensen is ordered to play second fiddle to Colonel ``Tip'' Tippett, a heroic veteran of Vietnam and Desert Storm, as well as a Jensen family friend, who has been hitting the bottle since he was passed over for a general's star. Almost by accident, Jensen discovers that Watkins's last call was to a Vietnamese restaurant on 14th Street near Washington's red-light district. The general's aide, the drop-dead gorgeous Major Talia Swanson, confirms that though her boss had served in Vietnam and recently visited former prisoner-of-war camps there, he was no fan of cracked rice and spring rolls. In fact, just before he died, Watkins was about to stop the current President's plans to normalize relations with Vietnama move that Watkins's rival, General Holmes, supports. The body count grows: Vietnamese and American Air Force officers, who may know something about a secret massacre in a North Vietnamese prison camp from which General Holmes conveniently escaped, are stabbed, shot, sliced to pieces, or blown up. In the process, Davis's dialogue-heavy narrative moves quickly, but its lack of descriptive detail and distinguishable characters lends an artificiality to the plot, which is yanked along by plug-in melodramatics like kidnappings and faked deaths. A terse, gung-ho military-thriller debut sans the usual high-tech hardware. Lots of action, but not much else. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Davis draws from the well of Vietnam-era demons to make his debut in the murder-in-the-Pentagon sweepstakes. As in State of the Union by David Callahan and Sweepers by P. T. Deutermann , the killings here are linked to murky business during the Vietnam War. Stock characters are customary for this genre: top-ranking brass who quash embarrassing investigations (in this case, into the murder of the U.S. Air Force chief) and an investigator who tenaciously pursues all leads. The investigator is air force officer Charles Jensen, whose initial step into the quagmire reveals that the chief, tortured and murdered with a signature North Vietnamese m.o., had been inquiring about the fate of POWs at a camp from which only the now-chairman of the Joint Chiefs and presidential aspirant General Holmes had escaped. Before Jensen can connect these two men, he and his ethnically diverse team ponder an ever-increasing body count. Davis plants enough clues in the activities of the victims to create uncertainty about what Holmes is concealing, but he clarifies the motive via a dramatic trick in which one "dead" man reappears very much alive, wreaking beaucoup mayhem on behalf of Holmes. No doubt a market exists for extravagant exaggerations of the Pentagon's actual scandals of turpitude or embezzlement, yet this tale goes so far beyond reality as to belong in science fiction. Still, initial demand is likely. Gilbert Taylor