Book: The General's Daughter by Nelson DeMille


Good military cop novel

Nelson DeMille
The General's Daughter
Warner Books, 1993
ISBN: 0-446-36480-0
$7.99
464 pages

When a buddy gave me a copy of The General's Daughter, I thought that I hadn't previously read anything by Nelson DeMille. But, flipping through the first couple of pages, I found that he wrote the cold-war thriller The Charm School, which I remember reading and enjoying very much. So I started The General's Daughter with pretty high expectations, and they were pretty much borne out.

In the book, Paul Brenner is a warrant officer with the Army's CID, its criminal investigation division. He's investigating a crime at Ford Hadley in Georgia when the commanding general's daughter is murdered in a way that suggests that she was sexually molested. The general's daughter is, herself, an army captain, which makes matters even more politically charged. Mr Brenner manages to wind up his earlier investigation pretty quickly and starts working on the new one. He ends up with a partner in the investigation, another CID warrant officer, Cynthia Sunhill, and it turns out that he has some history with her.

Pretty quickly they find that the victim isn't quite the squeaky-clean West Point graduate that she seemed to be. And they have an obvious suspect, but they don't seem to particularly think he did it.

The plot takes some satisfying twists and Paul Brenner is an entertainingly cynical and ironic narrator. On the downside, the ending isn't all that satisfying and the book could have been cut by 50 or 100 pages without losing anything. But, in all, it's a good crime novel in a setting you don't see often.

Posted: Tue - May 24, 2005 at 08:44   Main   Category: 

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