The Colonel » (Unabridged)

Parick A. Davis is a former Air Force major with more than thirteen years of experience. He helped plan and direct U-2 surveillance operations for Desert Storm, and flew eleven combat sorties. He is the author of The General and The Passenger, available from Brilliance Audio. Davis is a pilot for a major airline and lives in Roanoke, Texas.

A former Air Force investigator comes out of retirement to find a killer, only to discover a massive government cover-up.

Retired Air Force investigator Martin Collins lives a quiet life in rural Virginia, working as a local chief of police and consulting on military homicides. When he's called in to assist on a grisly triple murder, nothing can prepare him for the crime scene: Colonel Margaret Wildman and her two young children, their throats slashed, left to die in pools of their own blood.

At first, there seems to be no motive for the murders. But as Collins digs through an increasingly puzzling maze of clues, he reveals a secret that leads to the highest levels of the government - and the military. Buried files reveal a link between Colonel Wildman and series of fatal airline crashes; political pressure to keep a secret grows, as does the body count. Collins finds his own life jeopardized as he closes in on the truth, culminating in a shocking confrontation on the floors of Congress.

Kirkus Reviews

Behind an unusually vicious Beltway triple murder lurk Davis's trademark military-industrial conspiracies and cover-ups. Whoever killed Air Force Col. Margaret Wildman, a Pentagon aircraft maintenance specialist, really wanted her dead: she was brutally beaten before her throat was cut. What gives the murder particular ferocity, though, is the killing of her two preteen children, presumably right before her eyes. The method of killing is the key to the mystery surrounding Wildman's death, infuriatingly oracular Arlington County homicide investigator Lt. Simon Santos tells Martin Collins, the retired Air Force officer who's been pulled off his small-town police chief job to consult on another military homicide. After all, why didn't the perp wait till Wildman's children were at school to waylay her-especially since the motive was patently her suspicions about the safety of the Global 626 airliner, which had a dangerously unsatisfactory (and well-concealed) track record even before the Air Force tested the plane several years ago? The quest for an answer will take Collins, Santos, and Air Force investigator Amanda Gardner (a fifth wheel who seems to have been added only to cut the testosterone factor and spark movie-studio interest) from Wildman's explosive ex to her gossip-columnist best friend to a menacing pair of feds to a high-handed Air Force security chief with troubling links to Global's octopus to the higher-ups found along all the usual corridors of power. Miraculously, the hard-working, convoluted plot will reveal that they're all involved, along with others too numerous to list; unfortunately, they're all such two-dimensional types that it's hard to keep track of who'ssuspended whom from which investigation or confiscated which incriminating computer disk, let alone care very much about the outcome. His third high-powered, conscientious outing confirms that Davis (The Passenger, 1999, etc.) delivers the goods-as long as you don't prefer Godiva chocolates to Raisinets.