Brothers Mark and Matthew Grant come of age in the late 50s/early 60s. After high school, Mark joins the Army and becomes one of the first Green Berets, serving a couple tours in Vietnam. His most noteworthy assignment tasks him to the CIA to a Jack Straw (who later becomes the head of the CIAs spec ops division) and John Reardon (who becomes a Senator and potential presidential candidate). To help finance the war, the CIA aids the development and dispersion of heroin; many of the buyers are GIs who come home addicted.
After Vietnam, Mark comes home broken and addicted to eventually die of an overdose, but not before he gives Matthew his diaries of daily deeds while in country. Matthew never recovers from Mark’s death, stores the diaries in the family cabin in the Maine woods, goes off to college, becomes an engineer who builds desalination plants in the middle and far east, gets married, has a daughter, loses his wife to cancer, and now is left to raise a 16yo while still having to spend considerable time overseas. Thank heaven for a kind neighbor also with a 16yo daughter. Mid-1980s now.
On one trip to Jeddah, Matthew meets a network news reporter, Robin, who is looking into the CIAs actions in Afghanistan. At home, the CIA has contracted a Blackwater-type company to find Mark, to close up some old cases. Matthew comes to believe that these inquiries are connected to Mark’s activities in Vietnam but holds a secret about Mark’s demise that he never wishes to reveal. With Robin, Matthew has what’s necessary to expose the CIAs little drug ring to avenge his brother’s death and all those GIs who came home addicted.
Maybe it’s just me, but with a title like The Fourth Rule, we might get some idea of rules #1-3. Maybe it was just over my head. I thought Matthew’s secret was a bit far fetched and while I finished the book, it was a bit of a struggle. A few too many leaps of faith (or bad guy stupidity) for my tastes. And there were enough factual errors in this 2014 copyright to distract me from the plot (e.g., I-395 beltway around DC? seriously? 30 seconds on Google will tell you it’s I-495. too many others to mention). And the big reveal was easily predicted.
I finished it. But it will soon get buried in the nearly 900 reviews here at MRB
East Coast Don
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