TIN SOLDIERS

In this novel, a Kent State–like National Guard shooting plunges a compromised soldier/journalist into a deadly web of conspiracy and cover-ups.

The year is 1970. Vietnam veteran Wat Tyler has returned home under a shadow of controversy. The word is that he “developed a mile-wide yellow streak and withdrew your Green Berets in an act of gross cowardice that exposed a whole infantry company to enemy fire and cost the lives of two dozen of our boys.” He has returned to his position as a reporter for the New York Examiner under city editor Maggie Call, his adoptive mom and mentor. Maggie rescued the former teenage delinquent, who never graduated from high school, from the Brooklyn streets and taught him his trade. He enlists in the National Guard, where his presence is decidedly not welcome by Col. Philip Sheridan Riley. “You’re not a captain” anymore, “and you’re not a hero,” Riley thunders during their first meeting. Tyler is investigating a recent anti-war protest shooting on the Ramskill University campus, which came just three days after the National Guard killed four students at Kent State. The Ramskill shooting took the lives of two professors and a congresswoman’s son, and it was Riley who deployed more than 1,200 guardsmen that day. The dozen soldiers involved in the shooting belonged to the same outfit that Tyler is joining. Chadwick launches his Wat Tyler crime trilogy with this auspicious procedural that deftly establishes the period with evocative references (including the legendary rock palace the Fillmore). Tyler is a compelling figure with a fraught backstory on which to build a series. He is a proficient journalist, but his military background affords him an action hero’s physicality, as when he comes to the aid of a homeless man being harassed by street punks. Chadwick, an award-winning journalist, refreshingly eschews the hard-boiled tone, but some dialogue is flat (“yeller-belly”), and the “talking killer” trope is trotted out. Still, the author knows his way around telling a conspiracy story, even one as convoluted (albeit covert) as this one.

A captivating crime tale that delivers a welcome new sleuth with writing chops.