Secret Sanction FROM OUR EDITORS
Sent to Bosnia to investigate an army massacre of Serbian troops, Sergeant Sean Drummond knows that the last thing that anyone wants is justice. But once on the scene, this lawyer realizes that sometimes cover-ups contain cover-ups. Special-op excitement.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
It was the most horrifying military atrocity since My Lai - an elite US army special forces team positioned behind enemy lines had violated standing orders and butchered a patrol of twenty-five Serbian soldiers in cold blood. Worse, survivors of the initial attack had been shot in the back of the head, and one decapitated corpse had been left on the battlefield.
No explanation, and no obvious motive, but repercussions were already global. Now Major Sean Drummond, military lawyer, has to go to Kosovo and find out just what happened on that fateful afternoon. But with CIA obstruction, army hostility, the murder of a top journalist and a possible traitor in his own crew, Drummond quickly finds himself over his head and under serious fireﾽ
SYNOPSIS
Word of Honor meets A Few Good Men in this gripping thriller that pits the Green Berets, the CIA and the U.S. government against a top Army lawyer conducting an investigation everyone wants quashed.
FROM THE CRITICS
AudioFile
This first novel by Brian Haig, military strategist and son of former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, paints a picture of conspiracy in Bosnia. Military attorney Sean Drummond is assigned to probe the case of a U.S. Special Forces team accused of massacring 35 enemy soldiers. Jack Rubenstein reads the novel, told in the first person through Drummond's eyes, with a smart-alecky bravado and keen intelligence that give way to doubts as the case takes surprising turns. As character and situation prove more complicated than first indicated, Rubenstein gives both a touch of humanity that goes well with the suspense. J.A.S. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
Just when you thought it was safe to regard the legal thriller as moribund, along comes this stunning debut to re-breathe life into it. Major Sean Drummond, a former combat infantryman turned Army lawyer, gets assigned a case he doesn't much care for. Who could? It has career-breaker draped over it like a pup tent. The Judge Advocate General's Corp (read: JAG), which he's attached to, has posted him to Bosnia where a US Special Forces team is waiting for him to decide whether it's guilty of mass murder. Thirty-five Serbs have been found dead, bullets fired into their brains from close range, a carbon copy St. Valentine's Day massacre transferred to the Balkans. At least that's what the Serbs have begun to claim, fingering the Green Berets in a series of increasingly uncomfortable press conferences. Is all that part of a propaganda shuffle, or has the Geneva Conference indeed been flouted? It doesn't take long for Drummond to realize that there are agendas within agendas, that gimlet eyes are trained on him as unrelentingly as his own attention is focused on evidence sifting, and that he might well have become someone's idea of a custom-made sacrificial lamb. Why, for instance, are so many highly placed people suddenly hostile to him? Why does he get the unsettling sense that of the two hotshot legal guns reporting to him, one is a definite mole? And why, whenever the nine Green Berets profess their innocence, do they seem so thoroughly . . . coached? But Drummond, a combination hard-nose and closet romantic, doggedly pursues his investigation. His tone is sardonic, his expectations far from great—a stance predictable in a man who values honor while having to cope with a societythat merely pays it lip service. Well written and briskly paced, while in addition raising, evocatively, the ever-interesting question about whether loyalty is allowed to be blind.
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