Author: JW Stone
Publisher: Warriors Publishing
Rating: worthy!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
Errata:
P122 "explosive devise" should read "explosive device"
P133 has an HTML style instruction visible at the top of the page.
P163 "particlaur" instead of "particular"
Here's another disclosure. I'm a bit of a pacifist but I'm realistic enough to know that pacifism cannot hold back naked military aggression. So while I'm against jingoism and saber-rattling, I do also have a respect for and a fascination with the military. I've never been in the military and I don't require that stories be Tom-Clancy-detailed to a tedious and boring level. In fact, within certain broad limits, I wouldn't even know if the author were making it up or was really giving the honest truth, and that doesn't matter to me as long as it's believable within the context of the story.
Duty to Investigate seems like a bit of a clunky title to me, but it’s suitably military! I also have to confess that I was put off by the 'women are sexual objects' attitude prevalent throughout the opening chapters. I know this is a military novel, but that doesn’t mean it has to be chauvinistic - not in my book, anyway! And this genderistic approach isn't through the eyes of the male protagonist: it's embedded in the narration (not first person), so it's not appealing to me at all - but we'll see how that goes. Note that the story is set in 2004 as the military was gearing-up to go into Iraq post 9/11.
Lieutenant Colonel Mike Beck (USMC reserve) is a very successful lawyer of the ambulance-chasing variety, but writ large. He evidently uses women like playthings, and has a secretary who slaves over him adoringly, and for which she's entirely unappreciated. Beck is nudged into a promotion (to 4th Division's Staff Judge Advocate) by a colonel who is a close friend. What Beck doesn't know is that 4th Division is about to head out to Iraq after a bad shoot-out in Fallujah.
Anne Merrill is a news photographer who also works for a TV corporation. She's carrying two jobs in hopes of getting what she wants out of the photography side by giving a bit of a freebie to the TV side, so (again, depending on how this goes), the chauvinism is somewhat ameliorated by this. Perhaps part of the plot here is to show how a man like Beck changes when he meets a woman like Merrill. If that's so, it will be something to look forward to.
So how do these two meet? Well Merrill is like a dog with a bone as she pursues a case where a woman - a veteran's widow - is being turfed out of her house because of underhand shenanigans by a disreputable law firm. After she successfully pursues the investigation, she's granted anything she wants by her boss, and she chooses to be embedded with the Marines in Iraq as a photographer. So along with Beck and Merrill, there goes another guy to Iraq, one who signed up for the Marines after losing his job to the economy. He proves to be an outstanding marksman, and perhaps this is where the root of the problem will lie! But I'm not going to detail any more of this novel - that would spoil it for the writer and give too many spoilers for a new novel.
Well I'm happy to report that Stone pulls this out in the end, and I consider this book a good worthy. Yeah, I had a couple of issues with it, and the insta-love wasn't credible to me; I'd rather have seen that drawn out over a couple of sequels, but it was kept largely subdued, and not gushing. Apart from that, this was a good, solid military tale with some twists and turns and some action written by someone who's been there and done that, so how can I not recommend it?!
