Secret Sanction » (Reissue)

Word of Honor meets A Few Good Men in this gripping thriller that pits the Green Berets, the CIA and the U.S. government against a top Army lawyer conducting an investigation everyone wants quashed.

Kirkus Reviews

Just when you thought it was safe to regard the legal thriller as moribund, along comes this stunning debut to re-breathe life into it. Major Sean Drummond, a former combat infantryman turned Army lawyer, gets assigned a case he doesn't much care for. Who could? It has career-breaker draped over it like a pup tent. The Judge Advocate General's Corp (read: JAG), which he's attached to, has posted him to Bosnia where a US Special Forces team is waiting for him to decide whether it's guilty of mass murder. Thirty-five Serbs have been found dead, bullets fired into their brains from close range, a carbon copy St. Valentine's Day massacre transferred to the Balkans. At least that's what the Serbs have begun to claim, fingering the Green Berets in a series of increasingly uncomfortable press conferences. Is all that part of a propaganda shuffle, or has the Geneva Conference indeed been flouted? It doesn't take long for Drummond to realize that there are agendas within agendas, that gimlet eyes are trained on him as unrelentingly as his own attention is focused on evidence sifting, and that he might well have become someone's idea of a custom-made sacrificial lamb. Why, for instance, are so many highly placed people suddenly hostile to him? Why does he get the unsettling sense that of the two hotshot legal guns reporting to him, one is a definite mole? And why, whenever the nine Green Berets profess their innocence, do they seem so thoroughly . . . coached? But Drummond, a combination hard-nose and closet romantic, doggedly pursues his investigation. His tone is sardonic, his expectations far from great—a stance predictable in a man who values honor while having to cope with a societythat merely pays it lip service. Well written and briskly paced, while in addition raising, evocatively, the ever-interesting question about whether loyalty is allowed to be blind.