As the director of the Department of the Army's Central Identification Laboratory, Robert Dean "Kel" McKelvey has made a career solving some of the country's most complex identification cases. The CIL is responsible for identifying all U.S. war dead from battlefields old and new around the world. The caseload is endless, the endgame invaluable. Kel's work -- the examination of a bone or bone fragment -- may bring blessed closure to thousands of military families and loved ones left behind. But after fifteen years at the CIL, Kel is fast approaching emotional meltdown. And that's when he encounters his thorniest case yet: the recovery of Jimmie Carl Trimble, a soldier from Arkansas who died a hero's death during the Vietnam War. When a rare DNA sequence turns up at both the Army and FBI labs, it points to the unthinkable: a link between Trimble and a forty-year-old unsolved racial killing in the Arkansas delta. Partnered uneasily with the volatile FBI Special Agent Michael Levine, Kel must peel back decades of silence to reveal a complex web of stolen identity, betrayal, patriotism, collusion, and lies. Taking readers deep inside the fascinating world of military and civilian forensic science, "One Drop of Blood" is a pitch-perfect thriller by a talented new author who knows the terrain better than anyone.
- ISBN10 0425216934
- ISBN13 9780425216934
- Publish Date 1 August 2007 (first published 2 May 2006)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 18 May 2017
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Berkley Books
- Format Paperback (US Mass Market)
- Pages 357
- Language English