Major Harry Voss is a middle-aged American lawyer with the U.S. Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps. He is assigned the mysterious case by his long-time friend and superior in JAG, Col. Joe Ryan. Why would one American pilot shoot down another? Both the eyewitness accounts and the ballistics reports confirm Major Al Markham as the shooter.

Markham is a highly admired pilot with the 351st Fighter Group out of Donophan Airfield. Not long before, Donophan and the 351st had been targets of a German attack, and a large number of deaths had resulted. Five surviving pilots had undertaken a mission against a fuel storage facility in Belgium in retaliation for the deadly strike; only three had returned and now one of those has been killed by another. O’Connell was not liked by his fellow fliers. His repeated requests for a transfer out of the outfit had been denied.

Markham confesses to the shooting; his explanation is that he had been trying to force O’Connell to ditch his damaged aircraft in the sea rather than trying to land it. Harry Voss, however, feels that there is more to the story than Markham is willing to admit and suspects a deeper conspiracy.

Harry’s investigation will uncover a conspiracy of silence that reaches to high levels within the American command and may jeopardize his career.

In spite of its title and the hero’s position with JAG, The Advocate cannot be termed a legal thriller. The plot mainly concerns the investigation, and there are no courtroom scenes at all. Rather than being a whodunit, The Advocate is a whydhedunit. The killer is known from the opening scene, but the motives behind the shooting are revealed over the course of the story.

As important as discovering the truth is to Harry is the need of the Allied command to protect its image before the world. Once it becomes apparent that this is no open-and-shut case the military authorities are determined that Harry not expose the greater atrocity behind the murder of O’Connell. Harry is equally determined that even in times of war there are certain moral values that cannot be compromised. Some readers may find the ending somewhat ambiguous and question whether this dilemma is adequately resolved.

The most appealing aspect of the story is the character of Harry Voss. There’s nothing flashy about Harry. He’s a lonely husband and father from New Jersey and comes across as something of a fish out of water. His most admirable qualities are his devotion to his family and to the principles that he will not relinquish even under threat of patriotic necessity or personal risk.

Unfortunately the book suffers from a narration with a confused point of view and a superfluous narrator. Supposedly the story is told in the first person; the narrator is finally identified as Eddy Owen, a Scottish journalist. Periodically comments such as “he told me later” are inserted in the text to provide a rationale for the narrator to be privy to characters’ thoughts. The majority of the story, however, is written in the third person omniscient point of view without any such explanatory frame. This inconsistent use of point of view is awkward and confusing; it’s possibly the result of the collaborative work of two authors and the imperfect blending of their individual contributions. The narrative would have flowed more smoothly if a single point of view had been maintained throughout the book.

The narrator’s identity is not revealed for several chapters, and a reader may be excused for wondering who this “I” person is. Moreover, the subplots involving Eddy’s longing for his lost love and the hints about the cause of his losing one of his legs are completely extraneous to the main plot.

Its narrative problems prevent The Advocate from receiving a recommended rating, but it is an acceptable World War II-era suspense novel. Readers who enjoy stories set in this time period may want to check it out.

--Lesley Dunlap