cover image Kill Zone

Kill Zone

Jim Silver. Simon & Schuster, $23 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-684-84289-9

Following his impressive debut, Assumption of Risk (1996), Silver's second thriller starts strong--with a battlefield murder at the end of the Vietnam War--but quickly loses speed when the victim's son goes on a quest for vengeance. In 1970, captains Jim Manos and Tony Husta, two young officers in the Army Criminal Investigation Division, fail to get enough hard evidence to prosecute the nine-man rifle squad guilty of the ambush assassination of Major Ralph Longbaugh (who is listed as killed in action). Ten years later, Manos, now a CID major, debriefs Aaron Longbaugh, the murdered major's son, a 22-year-old sniper with 41 confirmed kills, as he returns from a hush-hush political mission. Secretly hoping that Aaron will avenge his father's death, Manos tells the son the truth about his father's murder. Shortly thereafter, young Longbaugh resigns from the military and, over the next 18 years, the surviving guilty soldiers die one by one, victims of a long-range sniper's bullets. While this presents a seductive premise for a top-notch thriller, overwriting, tedious repetitions, techno-babble and sappy internal monologues drain the proceedings of almost all suspense. (Jan.)