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PRIVATE SECTOR is the fourth of Brain Haig's novels to feature Major Sean Drummond, the redoubtable military lawyer whose presence in the Armed Forces seems to be the result of jamming an irresistible round peg into an immovable square-holed pegboard. Drummond is a smart aleck, and a brilliant one. Yet, his flip outward demeanor belies a tenacious attitude for righting wrongs and pursuing the truth, all the while steadfastly refusing to color within the lines. He would rather redraw them to fit the situation.
Drummond accordingly seems a somewhat unlikely choice to be loaned out to a high-powered, buttoned-up Washington, D.C. law firm pursuant to a joint U.S. government private sector program called "Working With Industry." The loan out program seems well intentioned. The Army sends one of their best and brightest attorneys to the private law firm for one year in order to expose the attorney to other areas of practice, while the law firm gets another brilliant mind to work with. The results are darkly hilarious.
Drummond is like a fish out of water almost from the minute he walks into the offices of Culper, Hutch, and Westin, and all the perks --- from the corner office to the company sports car --- can't make him walk the straight and narrow. Drummond figures that he can be just obnoxious enough to be sent back to the Army in a week or two.
All of this changes, however, when Lisa Morrow is murdered. Morrow is Drummond's fellow JAG officer and his predecessor in the Working With Industry project. She is also the object of Drummond's love/lust interest. Drummond was to meet Morrow on the night she was murdered. He in fact carries some guilt over the murder, given that he was late for their meeting. His timeliness might have prevented her death. Drummond finds that the offices of Culper, Hutch, and Westin contain resources ideal for investigating Morrow's murder. Within days, however, more women are found slaughtered in apparently unrelated murders. Drummond slowly comes to the realization that the path of the murderer leads back to the doors of his private sector employer and the firm's biggest client, a communications firm on the verge of signing a contract with the Pentagon that has a potential value of billions of dollars.
Drummond finds himself in a position where he can trust absolutely no one --- except for a rough-around-the-edges CID Agent named Dan Spinelli, with whom Drummond establishes a grudging camaraderie, and Morrow's sister Janet, a brilliant, capable and beautiful ADA from Boston. Drummond finds that in order to stop the murders and bring justice to Lisa Morrow, he will have to put himself --- and Janet --- in the path of mortal harm as they are pursued by a foe with apparently limitless resources and almost inhuman skill.
Haig's decision to move Drummond into private practice, if only temporarily, is brilliant. Drummond is a fish out of water, even in his own sea, and letting him play with the sharks in the ocean of private practice gives Drummond plenty of room to exhibit his always rapier-sharp wit. Haig also veers away from courtroom drama here, another welcome variation from his previous novels. And for those of us who wondered if Drummond would ever become lucky in love ... well, that appears to be the case toward the end of the novel. The best book in what has proven to be an excellent series to date, PRIVATE SECTOR has it all.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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