DEATH AT FORT DEVENS

Doing a favor for a fellow veteran who saved his life in Vietnam launches Boston shamus Andy Roark on a search littered with dead ends.

By 1985, Lt. Col. David Billings’ daughter, Judy, has reached the age when she’s started hanging out with unsuitable young men, and some not so young, and stopped listening to either her father or her mother, who’s drying out in Palm Springs once again. Now Judy’s gone AWOL, and Dave wants Andy, who’s never forgotten that he owes him his life, to look for her. Asking Dave to put aside a dollar to pay him, Andy hunts down Judy’s boyfriend, Derrick Page, a motor pool mechanic at Fort Devens, where Dave’s been assigned while he waits for his next inevitable promotion. Derrick insists he’s an ex-boyfriend who can’t help, and Judy’s friend Cindy, a waitress at a bowling alley, can only point to Kevin, the older guy Judy’s been hanging around with, whose nickname, K-nice, is not entirely accurate. Andy and his ex-lover Sue Teller make a reconnaissance tour of Boston’s Combat Zone, but although Andy stirs up a certain amount of collateral damage, he doesn’t find Judy. It turns out that Dave has known all along who Judy was with but hasn’t mentioned it for personal reasons. So Andy starts over again, armed with new information and a sharper sense of wariness. There’s only one plot twist that could possibly cap this trail of red herrings and false leads, and very few readers will be as surprised as Andy when it arrives.

The target audience: private-eye fans who greet a two-page glossary of military terms with delight.