his wide-ranging knowledge of the country’s military establishment, Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks has created an entirely credible, and disturbing, fictional tale of conspiracy among our highest-ranking military officials.

After observing the culture wars that dominated military-civilian interactions during the Clinton administration, Ricks reportedly felt that a novel, rather than a nonfiction book, was the best way to reveal the strains and conflicts that affect today’s soldiers.

At the center of his novel are two talented young officers who arrive at the Pentagon and conveniently fall in love. Majors Bud Lewis and Cindy Sherman are among the Army’s best, and they’ve both been tapped for prime positions as aides-de-camp for two of the Pentagon’s most senior generals. After Sherman and Lewis begin their tours of duty, they soon discover that a secret group of military officers who call themselves the Sons of Liberty is conducting covert protests against White House policy.

Failed missions in Algeria and a looming debacle in Afghanistan, coupled with a civilian leadership that’s out of touch, provide the backdrop for a gripping thriller and an excellent portrait of the American military. As the administration keeps the Army grinding through a miserable third-world brushfire war, the Sons of Liberty’s activities grow more treasonous, and their efforts to avoid detection more ruthless. Majors Sherman and Lewis find themselves in a vicious game with life-and-death stakes and the future of the American military hanging in the balance.

The subversive campaign gains more support as the Afghanistan mission worsens. In the end, the young officers are challenged to choose between their duties to a nation and its civilian leadership and their personal honor as officers expected to follow the orders of their superiors.

A Soldier’s Duty offers a provocative look at the post-Cold War generation of soldiers. A Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting at the Washington Post and the author of a nonfiction bestseller (Making the Corps), Rick has demonstrated with his first novel that fiction can be an effective tool for reporting a story.

Dominic Caraccilo is a lieutenant colonel in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment at Fort Benning, Georgia.

iles Blunt’s Forty Words for Sorrow takes place during a dreary February on the Chippewa Reserve in northern Ontario, Canada. Blunt’s bone-chilling description of the snowbound and desolate area is so crisp and concise that you practically need mittens to turn the pages: “All around them the snow fell away in shades that ranged from bone white to charcoal gray and even in the dips and scallops of the snowbanks deep mauve.” In this frigid setting, a serial killer is on the loose, and Blunt depicts the crime scenes in particularly graphic, and frightening, detail.

John Cardinal, a homicide detective with the Algonquin Bay Police Department in Ontario, has a lot on his mind. He’s obsessed with solving the case of several missing teenagers. In addition, he must simultaneously deal with a new partner, departmental politics, his wife’s ongoing illness and the financing of his daughter’s expensive education. While on the trail of the serial killer, Cardinal is a man with his own secrets. As a result, he himself becomes the target of an investigation. Who is investigating the investigator and why? Can Lise Delorme, his new partner, be trusted? More importantly, can Cardinal and Delorme stop the murderer from claiming another victim? Creating credible characters can be a challenge for some suspense writers. Not so for Blunt; he populates his novel with vivid and complex characters. The meticulous police work they employ is both plausible and convincing. Secondary figures, such as Jerry Commanda, the Ontario Provincial Policeman, come alive with the author’s precise and energetic writing style.

Blunt skillfully alternates the action and viewpoint between the hunter and the hunted, all the while maintaining the momentum and emotional impact of the story. This technique gives us a terrifying glimpse into the sinister minds of sociopaths. And, as far as villains go, they don’t come much more evil than this.

Forty Words for Sorrow is a gripping tale that delivers escalating tension as the detective and the killer speed toward each other on a harrowing collision course. C. L. Ross writes from Pismo Beach, California.

ne of the most remarkable things about the latest entry in John Lescroart’s series of legal thrillers featuring San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy is the utter freshness of the material. Through a half dozen outings (The 13th Juror, The Mercy Rule), Lescroart has managed to keep his regular characters three-dimensional and consistently interesting. In The Hearing, the characters that have populated Lescroart’s previous novels find new intrigue in the political and social worlds of San Francisco.

When a prominent black San Francisco attorney is found murdered, the key suspect is a homeless heroin addict found at the scene holding the gun and her jewelry. Because it is an election year, the politically ambitious and ruthless District Attorney Sharron Pratt decides to press for the death penalty to reverse her soft-on-crime image. The suspect’s brother is a close friend of Lescroart’s suave Irish lawyer, and against his better judgment, Dismas Hardy is persuaded to take the case.

As he digs into the evidence, trying to find a way to spare his client’s life, Hardy finds the case has strange ties to other political and legal goings-on in the city. An almost incestuous relationship between business, the prosecutor’s office and the murder victim has Hardy wondering, in spite of damning physical evidence, if his client actually had anything to do with the murder. The cop on the case, the black Jewish detective Abe Glitsky, who has reasons of his own for seeing the killer receive ultimate justice, also begins to have doubts about the guilt of the accused. Together, he and Hardy try to unravel the truth from a thicket of corruption and venality. Lescroart’s story is enriched by a careful rendering of the city that gives his legal thrillers a special flair. Even with a sharply disapproving portrait of corruption in city politics, Lescroart’s love of San Francisco comes through on every page.

With plenty of legal twists and turns, The Hearing will be an irresistible read for Lescroart’s legion of fans and all those who appreciate a well-crafted courtroom drama.

Michael Grollman is a freelance writer in New Jersey.