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

by Nelson DeMille

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Thegripping murder mystery about an upstanding military officer - the base commander's daughter - who's been leading an unsavory double life.

When a professional military woman with a pristine reputation is found raped and murdered, a preliminary search turns up certain paraphernalia, and sex toys that point to a scandal of major proportions, The chief investigator is reluctant to take the case when he learns that his partner will be a woman with whom he had a tempestuous affair and an unpleasant parting. But duty calls and intrigue begins when they learn that several top-level people may have been involved with the "golden girl" - and many have wanted her dead.

"DeMille is a master at keeping the reader hanging on to see what happens next." - Associated Press

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780759522640
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	04/01/2001
Series:	Paul Brenner Series , #1
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	34,549
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Nelson DeMille is a former U.S. Army lieutenant who served in Vietnam and is the author of nineteen acclaimed novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers Night Fall, Plum Island, The Gate House, The Lion, The Panther and Radiant Angel. His other New York Times bestsellers include The Charm School, Word of Honor, The Gold Coast, Spencerville, The Lion's Game, Up Country, Wild Fire, and The General's Daughter, the last of which was a major motion picture. For more information, you can visit 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/

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

Ann Campbell is dead, apparently raped and murdered on the firing range of the military base under her father's command. Her troubles are over, but for Paul Brenner, the CID agent assigned to her case, trouble is just beginning. John MacDonald's subtle, skillful narration brings this grisly tale to life. His vocal range is less in evidence in this work than in others he's narrated, but the listener will have no difficulty distinguishing the characters. MacDonald's voice is clear and well-suited to the first-person narrative. This is a spellbinding presentation of a best-selling work. B.L.W. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

NOV 94 - AudioFile