Nelson DeMille · 2002 · road

DeMille's second Paul Brenner novel, and half of it is a travelogue. A retired army investigator who served two tours is sent back to Vietnam thirty years on to find a North Vietnamese soldier who saw an American officer murder another at Quang Tri in 1968 - and is deliberately not told what the case is really about.

1. 1
   Saigon

   Ho Chi Minh City thirty years on, and Paul Brenner arrives as a tourist who is not one - a retired army investigator sent back to find a North Vietnamese soldier who witnessed an American officer murder another in 1968.

2. 2
   Nha Trang

   North by rail up the coast with Susan Weber, an American expatriate who attached herself to him in Saigon and whose reasons for being in Vietnam do not survive much examination.

3. 3
   Hue

   Phu Bai airport and the Century Riverside, and the first of the ground Brenner recognises - the imperial city that was taken and retaken in the Tet Offensive, and where his own war starts coming back.

4. 4
   Quang Tri

   The battle where it happened: an army captain shooting a lieutenant in a bank building during the fighting of 1968, seen through a hole in a wall by an enemy soldier who wrote about it to his brother.

5. 5
   Khe Sanh

   Up-country at last - the firebases, the A Shau valley and the hill country, where the ponds are water-filled bomb craters and the paths through the minefields are still marked because the mines are still there.

6. 6
   Dien Bien Phu

   Where the French lost Indochina in 1954, in the far north-west - and where an American veteran being followed by Colonel Mang's security police reaches the end of the road he can travel as a tourist.

7. 7
   Ban Hin

   A village in the northern hills, and the witness, and the twist: the identity of the murderer is not what anyone was sent to find, which is why Brenner was told as little as possible before he left.

8. 8
   Hanoi

   Out through the capital, which he has spent his whole adult life thinking of as the enemy's city - and DeMille, who served two tours himself, uses the last chapters to say what the war did to the country it was fought in.