"You can't trust anyone in this high powered military thriller!"

At the heart of this military thriller, like so many of the ones that have gone before it, is a conspiracy involving a lot of very important people in very high places in and out of government.

A soldier is killed by a sniper while on patrol in Iraq. A four-star general dies in a glider crash thousands of miles away in Germany. Called in to wrap up the paperwork involved in the NATO commander's mishap, Special Investigator Major Vin Cooper finds these unconnected, unfortunate events linked in a very strange way.

The man who died in Germany was the father of the boy shot in Iraq. He also just happened to be the son-in- law of a U.S. vice president. With his comely partner, Special Agent Anna Masters, Cooper discovers there's more than meets the eye here besides the fact that the general's glider was sabotaged.

As one would expect, the subsequent investigation will take Cooper and Masters into the sinister labyrinth of governmental duplicity and international politics that constitutes the usual playing field for this type of story. As they travel from Baghdad to Chechnya to Washington, D.C., the investigative duo will quickly realize that if they are successful in unmasking the villains, they could do irreparable damage to the U.S. military-industrial complex and rock the country to its very democratic foundations.

If conspiracy fiction is to your liking, you will certainly enjoy this well written debut by David Rollins, a creative Australian who hopes to turn his new action hero into a staple of the genre.

Reviewed by Bob Walch
Posted July 18, 2009