A British chemical company whose products might be the cause of an outbreak of mad cow disease is also implicated in a conspiracy. Attempting to prove it by investigating Co-World Chemical and its executives, and getting close to the truth of their unholy alliances and illegal practices, is freelance journalist Jim Reeves. When he's found dead in a rental car the San Diego police come up with nothing more than a suicide theory. But it's full of holes, in more ways than one, and his brother Gordon is going to track down his killers.

Gordon Reeve (as well as author Ian Rankin) is ex-SAS, a British special forces corps, and a man with some difficult memories that tend to ambush his nights from time to time. Despite that, he conducts classes in military survival techniques with his wife.

After flying to England to retrieve his brother's body he picks up a tail, a convincing sign of the danger his presence poses to someone. Once he returns with Jim's body to San Diego, his investigation starts in earnest. His early probes reveal who his enemies are and the stakes that are being played. The whole idea is that he's got to find the evidence that Jim died for before his bloody adversaries do, which includes the code name Agrippa, and some very bad characters, not the least of which is Jay, his old special forces team member who tried to get him killed on an Argentine battlefield as a means of saving his own neck. The memory of it continues to torment him, disrupting normality and giving him one more object to conquer.

Before it's over, Gordon Reeves will give us a lesson in infiltrating a hostile estate, in the application of burundanga, a powerful sedative that also works as a truth serum which obliterates the memory of its effect, and various military combat strategies that, in a climactic duel to the death with his arch enemy, is clearly derived from experience.

The military detail is, perhaps, Rankin's finest contribution in his articulate construction of a thriller that encompasses a fair slice of the globe. It certainly affords him a pallette beyond the station house of his Scottish Inspector John Rebus series. Fleshed out characters in this standalone story seem more challenging, but within the length of 400 pages, we find ourselves in the grip of concern for his hero, his mission, and personal safety.

The exaggeration of the truth serum "roofie" effects provides dramatic convenience, but after the applause dies down, we're left with the aftertaste of fictitious coincidence. *

Plotting is, if anything, too extended, slightly repetitive and choppy as a telling back story is introduced late in the narrative. For awhile, it feels like we're in a different book but, in the end, we assimilate it just as the author planned, and we've had a suspenseful journey with a guy we easily root for.

* Burundanga's source is a voodoo powder derived from a plant found in Columbia and part of the nightshade family. There, it's known as barrachera ("drunken binge") and medically as Scopolamine. A poison, it's hardly without serious side effects, and it's more likely to obscure memory than heighten it in the way Rankin does here. The fullness and immediacy of Gordon's victims' compliance is also rather suspect.