The General's Daughter (Paul Brenner Series #1)

by Nelson DeMille

Overview

Paul Brenner is a member of the Army's elite undercover investigative unit, with the authority to arrest any military person anywhere in the world. He has always wondered just how far he could push his power. He is about to find out. Captain Ann Campbell is the daughter of General "Fighting Joe" Campbell. She is a West Point graduate, beautiful, bright, and the pride of Fort Hadley. Her raped and murdered body is found on the firing range, naked and spread-eagled, her hands and feet bound with tent rope - but there is no sign of a struggle. All of Brenner's instincts tell him to avoid the case. Yet Brenner's natural curiosity is aroused. He takes the case. As if that decision weren't reckless enough, he finds himself teamed with rape specialist Cynthia Sunhill, a woman with whom Brenner once had a tempestuous, ultimately doomed affair and with whom the temperamental sparks still flare. Together, they will discover the truth about the brass above them: that beneath the neatly pressed uniforms, the military codes of honor, pride, and order hide a corruption as rank as Ann Campbell's own astonishing secret life. Paul and Cynthia learn that any number of people were sexually, emotionally, and dangerously involved with the Army's "golden girl," and any one of them could have wanted her dead. Far more than a richly plotted murder mystery, Nelson DeMille's The General's Daughter is a resonant and scathing portrayal of military life, demonstrating, unforgettably, how its members are different from - and at the same time, so much like - the rest of us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446364805
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	11/01/1993
Series:	Paul Brenner Series , #1
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	44,782
Product dimensions:	4.25(w) x 6.87(h) x 1.25(d)

About the Author

Nelson DeMille is the author of 18 acclaimed novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers Night Fall, Plum Island, The Gate House, The Lion, and The Panther. His other New York Times bestsellers include Wild Fire, The Gold Coast, and The General's Daughter. For more information on the author, you can go to www.NelsonDeMille.net.

Hometown:

Long Island, New York

Date of Birth:

August 22, 1943

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A. in political science, Hofstra University, 1974

Website:

http://www.nelsondemille.net/

Table of Contents

Editorial Reviews

The General's Daughter is bigger, more ambitious and rather pretentious....Mr. DeMille writes well enough, there is some snappy dialogue, the police work is painstakingly thorough, but none of the characters really come to life. -- New York Times

Newgate Callendar

A longish but fast-paced military novel set on a backwater post in Georgia. Paul Brenner, a warrant officer in the army's criminal investigation unit, reluctantly teams with an old flame, Cynthia Sunhill, to investigate the murder of Captain Ann Campbell. Ann's body has been staked down with tent pegs on a rifle range; she's naked but she hasn't been brutalized. She's the daughter of a famous general, just back from the Gulf War, and she's also the Army's poster girl, a graduate with honors from West Point. And yet her chosen specialty, psychological operations, has raised some eyebrows, and Brenner and Sunhill soon discover other dark secrets about her. DeMille maneuvers a host of near- cliches here: the good cop and the bad cop, the tired veteran, the virgin who is really a slut, the tough modern women who turns out to be tender and loving. But he also writes with far more depth than in his glitzy (and bestselling) The Gold Coast. A genuine note lifts the story out of the realm of crisp police procedural into a wistful commentary on the Old Army and the new, the end of the Cold War, Vietnam, racial and sexual tensions in the military and, finally, growing old. Highly recommended

John Mort

Immensely skilled and likable page-turner by bestseller DeMille, who returns to the military surroundings of Word of Honor (1985) and whose mastery of background, as with the Long Island rich of The Gold Coast (1990), equals his hand at characterization. One moonlit night at Port Hadley, Georgia, Captain Ann Campbell, the tomboy military brat of base commander General Joseph "Fighting Joe" Campbell, a hero of the Gulf war, is found strangled to death on the firing range—and not just strangled but spread-eagled and tied to tent stakes, naked, and possibly raped. On hand and working on another case is Warrant Officer Paul Brenner, an undercover agent of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, who is handed the murder. Brenner is seconded in the case by a rape-investigator for CID, Cynthia Sunhill, a married woman with whom he had a failed affair the year before in Brussels. The reader accepts this unlikely event, for the sport of it, and then becomes hooked securely as Paul and Cynthia trade wry quips throughout without once slipping into false bonhomie. As it turns out, Ann Campbell, attached to Psychological Operations at Hadley, was a supremely promiscuous woman out to undermine her father. The murder suspects include about 30 officers whom she brought down to the secret sex-room in her otherwise model house. Ann's motives stemmed from a shocking crime that happened ten years earlier, when she was a West Point cadet—an event that gave her a Nietzschean fixation on the abyss into which Paul and Cynthia must follow her: "There is a sort of spirit world that coexists with the world of empirical observation, and you have to get in touch with that worldthrough the detective's equivalent of the s‚ance." What follows is a deductive novel of unwavering excellence. A knockout. DeMille's done it again. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for January)

Kirkus Reviews