David Rollins introduced Air Force special investigator Vin Cooper in 2005′s THE DEATH TRUST, and damn near killed him off in the process. But Cooper is back in A KNIFE EDGE, and off on a whirlwind case of murder, terrorism, political conspiracy and a whole gaggle of double-crossing.
Cooper is assigned to investigate the death of Dr. Hideo Tanaka, a marine biologist who, along with his partner, geneticist Prof. Sean Boyle, was part of a development team for the Department of Defense. But then Boyle is suddenly killed in what looks like a terrorist bombing in San Francisco.
Cooper is pulled off the Tanaka/Boyle case and ordered to Florida to investigate the death of Sgt. Ruben Wright, a paratrooper and Cooper’s one-time brother-in-arms. As he gets deeper into the details, Cooper becomes determined to reveal if Wright’s death was murder or suicide. But he steals a few moments to keep posted on the unanswered questions of the deaths of Tanaka and Boyle.
Suddenly, in a head-spinning series of events, Cooper is yanked back to Washington, D.C., and ordered to return to the aftermath of the Tanaka/Boyle case. And these events take Cooper from D.C. to Pakistan, Korea and finally New York City, in a frantic chase to prevent a piece of dangerous biotechnology from falling into enemy hands.
Rollins is probably accurate in the way the military shifts an investigator like Cooper from one case to another, without so much as an explanation or time to catch a breath. But it makes for a bewildering narrative. Cooper is so thorough in his details of the death of Wright that you can’t help but wonder which case is the real concern of the book.
By the time we realize that the two cases are really interconnected — albeit by a single individual — the urgency of the situation and gone through the roof, and our credibility is challenged by events dominating the second half of the book that Cooper miraculously manages to live through. The fate of the world is at stake, of course. And Islamic terrorists are involved, wouldn’t you know (with Osama Bin Laden himself making a brief cameo). But so are those troublesome North Koreans!
Rollins obviously wants to give the likes of James Patterson and Nelson DeMille a run for their conspiracy-fiction money. And while A KNIFE EDGE is totally entertaining and seldom sluggish, the immensity of the conflict — with its everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink quality — is unnecessarily complicated and a bit tiresome.
Still, Cooper is a fine character; one whose resourcefulness and love/hate relationship toward the military — with its plethora of alphabet soup acronyms — is easy to cheer. So Rollins should tone things down a notch before he burns his character out, along with us readers. —Alan Cranis
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