Koko

Four men who fought together in Vietnam meet at the dedication of the memorial in Washington and learn that someone is killing people across South East Asia and leaving a playing card in the mouth of each body, marked with a name they all recognise. Michael Poole is a paediatrician with a dying marriage. Harry Beevers is the lieutenant who was court-martialled and acquitted over Ia Thuc and has never stopped explaining himself. Tina Pumo runs a restaurant in Manhattan. Conor Linklater drinks. Beevers persuades them to go looking, partly because he sees a book in it, and the search takes them to Singapore and Bangkok and back to New York, into the private catastrophe of a man none of them ever really knew. Straub writes the veterans with unusual patience, giving each his own failing civilian life before anything supernaturalish is even hinted at, and the horror when it comes is the entirely human kind: a childhood, a cave, an order given. It is a long, character-driven crime novel about what a country did to its young men and then declined to look at, and it works because the mystery and the damage are the same object.