General's Daughter (DeMille)

The General's Daughter
Nelson DeMille, 1992
Grand Central Publishing
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446364805


Summary
Captain Ann Campbell is a West Point graduate, the daughter of legendary General "Fighting Joe" Campbell. She is the pride of Fort Hadley until, one morning, her body is found, naked and bound, on the firing range.

Paul Brenner is a member of the army's elite undercover investigative unit and the man in charge of this politically explosive case. Teamed with rape specialist Cynthia Sunhill, with whom he once had a tempestuous, doomed affair, Brenner is about to learn just how many people were sexually, emotionally, and dangerously involved with the army's "golden girl." And how the neatly pressed uniforms and honor codes of the military hide a corruption as rank as Ann Campbell's shocking secret life. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Aka—Jack Cannon, Kurt Ladner, Brad Matthews, Michael
   Weaver, Ellen Kay
• Birth—August 22, 1943
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Hofstra University
• Awards—Estabrook Award
• Currently—lives on Long Island, New York

Nelson DeMille has a dozen bestselling novels to his name and over 30 million books in print worldwide, but his beginnings were not so illustrious. Writing police detective novels in the mid-1970s, DeMille created the pseudonym Jack Cannon: "I used the pen name because I knew I wanted to write better novels under my own name someday," DeMille told fans in a 2000 chat.

Between 1966 and 1969, Nelson DeMille served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. When he came home, he finished his undergraduate studies (in history and political science), then set out to become a novelist. "I wanted to write the great American war novel at the time," DeMille said in an interview with January magazine. "I never really wrote the book, but it got me into the writing process." A friend in the publishing industry suggested he write a series of police detective novels, which he did under a pen name for several years.

Finally DeMille decided to give up his day job as an insurance fraud investigator and commit himself to writing full time—and under his own name. The result was By the Rivers of Babylon (1978), a thriller about terrorism in the Middle East. It was chosen as a Book of the Month Club main selection and helped launch his career. "It was like being knighted," said DeMille, who now serves as a Book of the Month Club judge. "It was a huge break."

DeMille followed it with a stream of bestsellers, including the post-Vietnam courtroom drama Word of Honor (1985) and the Cold War spy-thriller The Charm School (1988) Critics praised DeMille for his sophisticated plotting, meticulous research and compulsively readable style. For many readers, what made DeMille stand out was his sardonic sense of humor, which would eventually produce the wisecracking ex-NYPD officer John Corey, hero of Plum Island (1997) and The Lion's Game (2000).

In 1990 DeMille published The Gold Coast, a Tom Wolfe-style comic satire that was his attempt to write "a book that would be taken seriously." The attempt succeeded, in terms of the critics' response: "In his way, Mr. DeMille is as keen a social satirist as Edith Wharton," wrote the New York Times book reviewer. But he returned to more familiar thrills-and-chills territory in The General's Daughter, which hit no. 1 on the New York Times' Bestseller list and was made into a movie starring John Travolta. Its hero, army investigator Paul Brenner, returned in Up Country (2002), a book inspired in part by DeMille's journey to his old battlegrounds in Vietnam.

DeMille's position in the literary hierarchy may be ambiguous, but his talent is first-rate; there's no questioning his mastery of his chosen form. As a reviewer for the Denver Post put it, "In the rarefied world of the intelligent thriller, authors just don't get any better than Nelson DeMille."

Extras
(From a Barnes & Noble interview)

• DeMille composes his books in longhand, using soft-lead pencils on legal pads. He says he does this because he can't type, but adds, "I like the process of pencil and paper as opposed to a machine. I think the writing is better when it's done in handwriting."

• In addition to his novels, DeMille has written a play for children based on the classic fairy tale "Rumpelstiltskin."

• DeMille says on his web site that he reads mostly dead authors—"so if I like their books, I don't feel tempted or obligated to write to them." He mentions writing to a living author, Tom Wolfe, when The Bonfire of the Vanities came out; but Wolfe never responded. "I wouldn't expect Hemingway or Steinbeck to write back—they're dead. But Tom Wolfe owes me a letter," DeMille writes.

• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, here is what he said:

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read this book in college, as many of my generation did, and I was surprised to discover that it said things about our world and our society that I thought only I had been thinking about, i.e., the ascendancy of mediocrity. It was a relief to discover that there was an existing philosophy that spoke to my half-formed beliefs and observations. (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews
The General's Daughter is bigger, more ambitious and rather pretentious, though [it] should hold your attention.... Mr. DeMille writes well enough, there is some snappy dialogue, the police work is painstakingly thorough, but none of the characters really come to life.
Newgate Callendar - New York Times

Compelling... Intense.... [It's] a pleasure to read a novel that speaks about important issues while holding us in thrall. Nelson DeMille is an intelligent and accomplished storyteller who's written a good book.
Miami Herald

Hits the mark.... Suspense and plot are the strong points in this steamer. DeMille sustains our interest as he deviously weaves a web of suspicion around the many characters before revealing the killer in the smashing climax.
Florida Times Union

After the wit and panache of his bestselling The Gold Coast, DeMille's latest effort may disappoint his fans. The author returns to his more customary stylish-suspense-novel mode but retains a smart-aleck narrator—here, Paul Brenner, of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. At Fort Hadley, Ga., Ann Campbell, daughter of the post commander, is found murdered under bizarre circumstances. Brenner learns that Ann's entire personal life, in fact, veered toward the bizarre; she even had a secret basement "playroom" in her home. Moral turpitude runs riot at Fort Hadley, and Brenner must wade through muck of all sorts to discover the killer's identity. Too much muck, as it turns out: the detective work becomes repetitious, and suspense is unfortunately in short supply. Brenner's one-liners have none of the punch of John Sutter's wry observations in The Gold Coast—indeed, the device of a waggish narrator doesn't fit these proceedings; the wisecracks seem grafted on. So, too, does a resumed romance between Brenner and an old flame—we don't get a good enough picture of either to care about whatever sparks might fly. Characterization in general is fuzzy, though DeMille captures the often unquestioning regimen of life on a military base. One only wishes that his tale had more spirit and dash.
Publishers Weekly

[DeMille' writes with far more depth than in his glitzy (and bestselling) The Gold Coast. A genuine note lifts the story out of the realm of crisp police procedural into a wistful commentary on the Old Army and the new, the end of the Cold War, Vietnam, racial and sexual tensions in the military and, finally, growing old. Highly recommended.
Booklist


Immensely skilled and likable page-turner by bestseller DeMille, who returns to the military surroundings of Word of Honor (1985) and whose mastery of background, as with the Long Island rich of The Gold Coast (1990), equals his hand at characterization. One moonlit night at Port Hadley, Georgia, Captain Ann Campbell, the tomboy military brat of base commander General Joseph "Fighting Joe" Campbell, a hero of the Gulf war, is found strangled to death on the firing range—and not just strangled but spread-eagled and tied to tent stakes, naked, and possibly raped. On hand and working on another case is Warrant Officer Paul Brenner, an undercover agent of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, who is handed the murder. Brenner is seconded in the case by a rape-investigator for CID, Cynthia Sunhill, a married woman with whom he had a failed affair the year before in Brussels. The reader accepts this unlikely event, for the sport of it, and then becomes hooked securely as Paul and Cynthia trade wry quips throughout without once slipping into false bonhomie. As it turns out, Ann Campbell, attached to Psychological Operations at Hadley, was a supremely promiscuous woman out to undermine her father. The murder suspects include about 30 officers whom she brought down to the secret sex-room in her otherwise model house. Ann's motives stemmed from a shocking crime that happened ten years earlier, when she was a West Point cadet—an event that gave her a Nietzschean fixation on the abyss into which Paul and Cynthia must follow her: "There is a sort of spirit world that coexists with the world of empirical observation, and you have to get in touch with that world through the detective's equivalent of the seance." What follows is a deductive novel of unwavering excellence. A knockout. DeMille's done it again.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The General's Daughter:

1. Talk about the victim, Capt. Ann Campbell. What kind of character is she? How has she been shaped by the past?

2. This entry is found in Ann Campbell's journal:

Why do some men think they have to be knights in shining armor? I am my own knight, I am my own dragon, and I live in my own castle.

What does the passage reveal about Campbell—her state of mind, her belief in herself, and her attitude toward men?

3. Are you sympathetic...or disturbed by Ann Campbell? Or both?

4. What about the rape and cover-up at West Point—and especially Joe Campbell's role in it? Should he have been more protective of his daughter? Or did his professional duties take precedence? Do you understand the rationale for the cover-up...or is it a male-centric view, one that dismisses female rights to justice?

5. Talk about Cynthia Sunhill and her role in book. Why does DeMille provide a female sidekick in this investigation?

6. How would you describe Sunhill and Brenner's current relationship? Were you rooting for the romance between the two to be rekindled...or didn't you care? Sunhill asks Brenner, "why didn't you fight for me? Wasn't I worth it?" Why didn't Brenner fight for her?

7. What kind of character is Paul Brenner? What drives him? Do you enjoy his wisecracks...or does his tough-guy routine wear thin?

8. In what ways does this case challenge the standard procedures of detective work? What is meant by the "spirit world that coexists with the world of empirical observation" that Brenner and Sunhill must now enter to solve this mystery?

9. In many ways, the novel is a commentary on the difference between the old and new amy. How does DeMille draw the distinctions between the two?

10. Does this novel deliver in terms of suspense and mystery? Are the twists and turns surprising? Did you find yourself quickly turning pages...or did it drag for you?

11. The killer all but introduces himself early on. Did you figure it out? Or were you surprised by the ending? Does the perpetrator's motivation seem credible? Were all loose threads tied up...or left unanswered?

12. Have you seen the 1999 film with John Travolta and Madeleine Stow? If so, how does it compare with the book?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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