Before I finished the first chapter of The Oath, Dennis Koller’s San Francisco–based mystery/thriller, I was feeling uncomfortable.
Dennis Koller
Koller’s novel starts with a flashback to 1966 at the “Hanoi Hilton,” the North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp where captured American soldiers were tortured as well as paraded out to meet a delegation of U.S. anti-war protesters, clearly modeled after Jane Fonda and her colleagues.
I wasn’t old enough then to oppose the war, let alone join an anti-war delegation to Hanoi, but a few years later, I was one of the millions of Americans protesting the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
I girded myself for what I expected would be a challenging read. In those early pages, the author seemed to be suggesting that people like me were the enemy. But a funny thing happened once the setting jumped from Hanoi to modern-day San Francisco. The tone changed.
I was asked to read The Oath by Shari Weiss, the coordinator of the BAIPA Book Awards. She told me the novel was in contention for this year’s award, and was a political thriller similar to my book, Bones in the Wash, which won last year’s Best Book Award. (And which has a decidedly liberal bent.)
I told myself to put my politics aside. I’ve read Tom Clancy, after all, and got hooked on his galloping plots even though I didn’t care for his militaristic perspective.
The Oath begins with one of those Vietnam POWs killing Ruth Wasserman, a San Francisco reporter who decades earlier had covered (and, in his mind, glorified) the anti-war delegation’s visit to Vietnam. Soon enough, we’re following another vet, S.F. police lieutenant Tom McGuire, who’s assigned to investigate the murder.
The plot races along — I read it in a couple days — mostly from McGuire’s point of view, with short “updates” from McGuire’s revenge-seeking former Vietnam colleague, who’s already killed four people and has one more in his sights, a former anti-war leader, now the governor of California.
There’s a romantic subplot that’s fun and flirty, but a bit two-dimensional. We never learn much about the beautiful Michelle. There’s some witty dialogue and innuendo between the lovers, without any graphic descriptions of body parts. Nicely done.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the politics was far more nuanced than I expected after the first chapter. For example, Koller gives plenty of air time to Wasserman’s rants against American imperialism. She comes across as arrogant, but her critiques are sharp and realistic except for some ridiculous conclusions about China. Koller made politics a big part of the story — it was the motivation for the crazed killer — but most of the book follows the likable McGuire as he searches for the murderer, trying to prevent him from claiming his fifth victim, and pursues the willowy Michelle.
The Oath deservedly won the 2016 BAIPA first-place award for fiction.
