The Death Trust

Twelve months ago, Sergeant Peyton Scott died on patrol in Baghdad, officially killed by a landmine. Nobody looked twice, not even his father, four-star General Abraham Scott, commander of Ramstein Air Base and son-in-law of Vice President Jefferson Cutter, one of the most feared men in Washington. Now the general is dead too, his glider found smashed into a mountainside in what looks, almost convincingly, like an accident.

Major Vin Cooper of Air Force Special Investigations is sent to close the file fast and quiet, and turns out to be the wrong man for that job. Paired with Special Agent Anna Masters, Cooper finds that General Scott's death was no accident, that his son's Iraq autopsy was forged by a pathologist who has since turned up dead himself, and that a woman named Varvara Kadyrov, connected to both men, is hiding something behind a suspicious apartment fire of her own. Every door leads back to the Scott family: to Harmony Scott, the general's icy widow, and to her father, Vice President Cutter, a man Washington calls "Jeff the Cutter" for good reason, and who does not take kindly to an Air Force investigator poking around his family's business.

With only an off-book RAF contact, Flight Lieutenant Peter Bishop, willing to help him dig, Cooper follows the case from a shallow grave in Iraq to a family that believed itself untouchable, uncovering a conspiracy built on defense contracts and buried records, and the conviction among the powerful that a dead soldier is easier to manage than a live scandal. THE DEATH TRUST is the first novel in David Rollins's Vin Cooper series, a fast-paced conspiracy thriller built on the uncomfortable premise that the gravest threats to a soldier's life are not always the ones wearing an enemy uniform.