Saigon Commandos

Every once in a while, when you pick up what you think will be a nice bit of fluff to while away some time, you find you've happened upon a damn good book. That is the surprise I had when I picked up this paperback original and found an interesting story. Jonathan Cain has combined the men's action genre with the police procedural and come up with a winner. This is the 1st in a series about MPs on the streets of wartime Saigon. As one charcter says "we're cops first, then soldiers". As in any good procedural, the squad is juggling several cases at once. Sometimes the cases mesh, others are solved and added to the files. Here we have a psychotic prostitute, a deserter bent on revenge against his girl's killers, and the hunt for perpetrators of war atrocities in a small village. Being a men's adventure paperback original, the sex and violence quotient is higher than the usual big city procedural, but it is still a good read. While he's no Ed McBain, Cain shows a talent for weaving a good procedural and I look forward to the rest of the series.