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.

s 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.

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.

A speculative spy thriller Tim Powers is a masterful melder of fact and fiction, reality and unreality, realism and surrealism. This foremost North American magic realist (author of The Anubis Gates, World Fantasy Award-winner Last Call, Earthquake Weather and many others) mesmerizes readers with hidden layers of plots and conspiracies. His latest novel, Declare, is vintage Powers speculative fiction based on documented facts. Fact: Kim Philby was a British intelligence operative who defected to the Soviet Union. Fact: Philby worked for both sides and precipitated the greatest British cold war spy scandal. Fact: Philby spent years in the Middle East with his father, a noted Arabist. Powers excels at connecting historical dots his own way, placing Philby precisely where he was at any given time, but with different and far more fanciful motivations. In Nazi-occupied Paris, British double agent Andrew Hale proves a worthy nemesis for Philby, though his connection to the stuttering spy remains mysterious until a chilling climax on Mount Ararat’s frozen peak. In the early 1960s, Hale is called back to atone for his failure on Mount Ararat years before, when the men he led were either killed or driven insane. Hale’s journey is a mind-blowing trip through the cold war.

Blending his Le CarrŽ-style plot with history, theology, the Arabian Nights and the true nature of the ankh (anchor), Powers proves how vibrant fantasy can be. If you yearn for an original, innovative author, you can’t miss with Tim Powers.

ÊDeep South, the latest installment in the wildly popular Anna Pigeon series, finds our intrepid park ranger assigned to the Natchez Trace Parkway in rural Mississippi. In the wee hours of the morning, as she pilots her Rambler (can she be the only heroine in history who drives a Rambler?) through the pre-dawn gloom, she spies a hand painted sign nailed to a tree: REPENT. Then another, this one riddled with bullet holes: REPENT; FINAL WARNING. Anna has been on the road for 22 hours straight, surely a record for a Rambler, en route from her last posting at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, and she is beginning to have the unsettling feeling that she has made a mistake.

Her meager possessions unloaded from a small U-Haul trailer, Anna settles in to her role as district ranger. As is usually the case in Barr’s novels (and Anna’s life), things don’t stay quiet for long. It seems a local high school girl has gone missing on prom night. When Anna’s black lab, Taco, unearths a bloody scarf near the site of a recent disturbance, Anna suspects the worst. Her fears are borne out with the discovery of a girl’s body, hastily disposed of in the deep woods. The bloody sheet over the girl’s head, Ku Klux Klan style, has the earmarks of a political bombshell.

The plot thickens as Anna discovers that the Caucasian victim was carrying on a secret (well, not entirely) relationship with a black college football hero. Add to that the fact that her prom date, an obnoxious white jock, is withholding information on the crime, and you have the beginnings of a case that could have racial implications far beyond the boundaries of Mississippi.

Several of the persistent regional stereotypes are addressed in Deep South, including Civil War reenactments, old time religion, the lingering racial prejudices on both sides of the color line, and even the high school girls’ predilection for wearing copious quantities of cosmetics. As with the previous Anna Pigeon novels, Deep South is fast-paced and well-crafted. Ms. Barr is on familiar ground here, as she makes her home in Mississippi, and has served as a park ranger in the Natchez Trace Parkway area.

Bruce Tierney is a writer in Nashville, Tennessee.

All you really need for a good nature thriller is a scary animal attack. True North supplies a satisfactory one, and throws in a scary human one as well, so nothing else is required for the reader here but a comfortable sofa and the off switch on the television remote control.

Don’t let the author’s formidable name spook you into saving her first novel for your more literary moments. True, this book is thoughtful, and will raise your consciousness about the anomalous position of Native Americans in the state of Alaska. Mainly though, it wants to alert you to the extraordinary ambiance of the place and give you a thrill along the way.

Bailey Lockhart carries baggage from a traumatic New England past when she becomes a bush pilot in the wilds of Alaska. She keeps the past at bay by buying a piece of wilderness land and burying herself in the routine of sheer survival. For six years it works, but suddenly the arrival of a naively arrogant young couple forces her out of her protected isolation and reopens her cache of hurt. What’s more, this painful episode comes at a time when the local native population has begun to splinter in its varying reactions to U.

S. government policies, and she is caught between renewed discomfort as a white outsider and her affection for the people, especially Kash, the leader of the more peaceful local political movement.

Eventually she is forced by circumstance and coincidence to come to terms with her wounded and wounding memories though not before death and a clarified love intervene.

Kafka is a certified wilderness emergency medical technician, comfortable in the wilds of both Alaska and Wisconsin, and has taught writing and literature at the University of Michigan and elsewhere. Her early brashly driven prose softens into a lover’s appreciation of a familiar country, where the human beings do not always live up to the land. As first novels so often do, this one improves before your eyes, gaining skill and grace with each succeeding page.

Alaska will always steal the show, of course, but read this one for the traditional thriller values of suspense and a good story. Popcorn is optional.

Maude McDaniel is a reviewer in Cumberland, Maryland.

If you’ve read one Larry Bond novel (The Enemy Within, Red Phoenix, etc.), you’ve probably read them all. Of course, if you’ve read them all, then you’re like me, and you’ve continued to enjoy his escapist, globe-trotting thrillers and tales of semi-plausible headlong plunges toward the end of the world as we know it. Do the good guys win? I’ll give you one good guess. Are the bad guys really, really bad . . . I mean bad on a world-shaking, civilization-destroying level? Sure are. Is the technology pretty darned cool and yet at the same time frighteningly real? Yes again, and that’s the heart of Bond’s success, especially in his latest, Day of Wrath. Bond, who was an uncredited partner and consultant on Tom Clancy’s early books, knows his stuff, and his expertise shows in descriptions of everything from handguns to nuclear missiles.

The heroes of 1997’s Enemy Within, Colonel Peter Thorn and FBI Special Agent Helen Gray, return in Day of Wrath to battle yet another Middle Eastern terrorist overlord bent on destroying the decadent country of America. (One quibble: It seems sort of easy and predictable to make the villain an Arab . . . again. Surely there are bad guys elsewhere. In Bond’s favor, though: The top henchmen of key villain Prince Ibrahim are ex-East German secret policeman. It’s a new world.) The action moves from the forests of Russia to the streets of Berlin to Washington, D.

C.’s Virginia suburbs, with stops for gunplay at many places along the way. The reason for all the chasing is that Thorn and Gray are the only people who know the secret of Ibrahim’s “Operation,” a secret I won’t reveal here, but suffice to say the title of the book is appropriate. The duo is forced to take extreme measures to safeguard themselves and the secret in a typically nail-biting race to the “whew-that-was-close” climax. Along the way, the romance between Thorn and Gray that budded in the previous Bond book blooms brightly. Their between-the-gunshots romantic by-play seems a little forced sometimes, but gives a more human flavor to the out-there proceedings.

However out-there the plot gets, the kernel of truth and dangerous possibility that lies at its heart forces the reader to consider the “what-if factor.” I hope that if there’s a real Prince Ibrahim out there, we have more than just two people to stop him, but for now, the resourceful Thorn and the sturdy Gray will do nicely.

Reviewed by James Buckley, Jr.