Unfriendly Fire

Nelson DeMille is a prolific and popular producer of detective novels whose dependably entertaining works usually warrant an entire shelf of retail space. Often set in interesting locations (inside the NYPD, the CIA and the former Soviet Union, to name a few), they are researched deeply and written well. That is clear in his noteworthy achievement, “The General’s Daughter,” a murder mystery set on a U.S. military base (and a far better book than the ghastly 1999 movie version).

A sequel to that bestseller, DeMille’s “Up Country” centers once again on Paul Brenner, the wisecracking but rarely wise U.S. Army criminal investigator. Having been forced into early retirement as a result of his tendency to buck authority, Brenner is bored by civilian life, emotionally and professionally adrift, a disaffected Vietnam vet stuck in middle-aged ennui.

So when his old boss asks him to take on one more assignment, Brenner has nothing better to do than accept. The case involves a murder committed in Vietnam more than 30 years ago. The only evidence is an eyewitness account from an enemy soldier who saw an unidentified U.S. captain kill an unknown U.S. lieutenant in the midst of the bloody Tet Offensive.

Brenner must return to Vietnam, locate the witness and identify the victim and perpetrator, all while confronting the ghosts of his past and the errors of his nation. The mission sounds suitably impossible, but if he succeeds, he might just pave the way to a new golden age of relations between the two nations and even obtain the most absurd of all modern conceits: closure. Convoluted as it becomes, the plot is just a cover for a dramatized travelogue inspired by DeMille’s return trip to Vietnam about 30 years after he served and fought there.

Like any tourist, Brenner visits places of interest, learns about the country’s infrastructure and has lots of transportation problems involving bad roads and worse drivers. Along the way, he takes on a travel companion, an American businesswoman who admits to being a predatory capitalist, and confronts the evil Colonel Mang, a Communist stereotype who spouts the kind of anti-American sloganeering we’ve not heard since Aldo Ray and John Wayne wore green berets.

Clearly, DeMille wants us to know Vietnam is a complicated place. But “Up Country” amounts to little more than a tedious description of a bad road trip. What was charming about the Brenner character in the earlier book becomes irksome this time around; his insolence is not diminished because he refers to himself without much irony as “charmingly irresponsible and delightfully smart-assed.” The dialogue is cliched; characters say things like “trust no one” and “history is written by the winners”; the logic of military intelligence (always an oxymoron) is nonexistent: If the case is so sensitive, why does the Army insist on using the wildly uncontrollable Brenner? And the pace of the storytelling is downright drowsy as Brenner experiences more flashbacks than a Grateful Dead fan.

Though one salutes DeMille’s service to his country as a young soldier and admires his commitment to trying to understand today’s Vietnam, “Up Country” is a morass.

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Jonathan Shapiro is a former federal prosecutor who teaches at the USC School of Law.