Red Flags
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Viet Nam, 1966: A dead body in a combat zone barely merits a second glance. The perfect place to commit a murder.
Army cop Erik Rider is content to fight his war in the sophisticated streets of Saigon, so he’s less than thrilled at being sent to a tiny American outpost in the remote wilderness of the Central Highlands. Sitting perilously close to a North Vietnamese infiltration route, Cheo Reo is rife with intrigue and betrayal: American supplies are being siphoned off by South Vietnamese corruption, the Montagnards are ready to start a bloody rebellion to regain their ancestral homeland, and Communists are harvesting opium to finance their war effort. Rider’s been sent to take down the opium operation, but soon finds himself entangled with a local CIA man and an alluring doctor serving the indigenous tribes. As he closes in on the opium fields, he learns that not all enemies are beyond the perimeter. Someone in Cheo Reo wants him dead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jurjevics's intriguing if at times diffuse novel of the Vietnam War centers on Capt. Erik Rider, a military investigator dispatched to a remote base called Cheo Reo to disrupt the funding of North Vietnamese troops through opium production. What he discovers is a web of systemic corruption involving local politicians and South Vietnamese military leaders, all of whom are operating with the tacit approval of U.S. military commanders. Jurjevics (The Trudeau Vector), himself a Vietnam veteran, is best when describing the details of daily life during war, particularly those involving the abuse of the huge native tribal population of Montagnards. Too often, though, the narrative spins off into side episodes that are hard for the reader to connect with Rider's investigation. A framing device used to bracket the plot a daughter seeking out Rider decades after the war's end for information about her father, who was Rider's commanding officer ends in a predictable resolution after a promising setup.
