Under the Banner of Valor
by Gary Corbin
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense / Police Procedural
Print Length: 455 pages
Reviewed by Erin Britton
A politically charged and highly emotive police procedural with a healthy dose of crime and carnage
Courageous officer Valorie Dawes proves more than a match for extremists and criminals alike in Gary Corbin’s Under the Banner of Valor. This marks the fifth literary case for Officer Valorie Dawes to solve.
She’s a young and tenacious sleuth who “is no wet-behind-the-ears rookie. She celebrated a full year on the force last week and broke several high-profile cases […] in a very short time.” Valorie is fast becoming the lynchpin of the Women’s Anti-Violence Emergency (WAVE) Squad and is dedicated to protecting the female citizens of Clayton, Connecticut.
Lately, however, things have been unusually slow for the WAVE Squad. The arrival of Veronica Carlton—who just happens to be one of the people saved from a mall shooter by Detective Valentin Dawes, Valorie’s uncle, on the day he was killed—changes that. She files a complaint about being the victim of a cyberattack: “‘They’ve shut down my website multiple times,’ Carlton said. ‘And they issued threats of physical harm against myself and my employees.’” Veronica and her senior staff at the VeroniCare spa claim that they have no idea who would want to destroy the company. Yet, there are some signs that they’re not being truthful.
Valorie immediately picks up on hints that the threats might be an inside job and that the animosity might be due to the company’s new—and supposedly voluntary—community service program, particularly the activities “contributing to family planning and women’s health groups.” Still, there’s little to be done at this point apart from having police IT expert Shelby Clearwater comb through the VeroniCare systems for evidence, although the abortion issue is prominent in Valorie’s mind after learning that her best friend, Beth, is planning to have a termination. And things become even more complicated when the WAVE Squad receives a tip that “Terrorists have threatened to attack all family planning centers in Clayton unless they close.”
Meanwhile, after being dishonorably discharged from the military, Stafford Allen Ray is looking for a new cause, a new way to serve. Unfortunately, he hits upon the idea of waging a one-man—or, perhaps, one man and a shadowy mentor—war against family planning clinics and decides to put his skill as a sniper to use against his chosen enemy. “He would not fail in service to humanity.” And he soon spots his first target in the parking lot of the Safe Haven Family Planning building. “A new ‘customer.’ Like the others, a potential baby killer. Fury boiled inside him.” Luckily for her, Stafford’s first visit to the clinic is actually just a practice run.
When the trouble at VeroniCare escalates, Stafford launches the active part of his campaign against local family planning clinics, and Valorie and the WAVE Squad enter a race against time to prevent further blood from being spilled on the streets of Clayton. And as her professional and personal lives intertwine in potentially deadly ways once again, Valorie is going to need both her intelligence and her physical prowess to bring the various criminals to justice.
While Under the Banner of Valor is the fifth novel starring Officer Valorie Dawes, Gary Corbin provides sufficient detail and backstory for it to be enjoyed as a standalone. Saying that, there’s so much going on in the novel that venturing into the back catalogue is going to be very tempting. The cases at hand have links back to murky matters from the past, and there is so much to unpack with VeroniCare and the abortion center attacks that readers will be curious about what other intricate matters and twisty thrills Corbin conjured up in the books before this.
Valorie is an intriguing lead character. A handy mix of brain and brawn, she’s kind of the ideal police officer, and that’s before factoring in her family history with law information and her personal history of cracking some seriously complex and deeply disturbing cases. She’s dedicated to the job and to doing all the training, paperwork, and exams necessary to secure a promotion to the detective rank, but she’s equally dedicated to helping out her friends and loved ones, particularly Beth and Gil. While the latter attribute is certainly laudable, it does sometimes have the effect of rendering her dialogue naïve and a little unbelievable.
Fortunately, there are only a few occasions when her character slips in this way; otherwise, Corbin does a great job of maintaining her incisive persona and kick-ass nature. In fact, it’s just as well that Valorie has recently restarted her jiu jitsu training at Master Daisuke’s dojo, as several of the villains she faces in Under the Banner of Valor have links to an extremist organization known as IncelNation and, as the name suggests, they have a particular hatred for strong, capable, and independent woman—who they like to describe with laughably awful terms such as “FemiNazi.”
Under the Banner of Valor is action-packed and features a fair amount of gunplay. Corbin also takes pains to explore the political and moral aspects of the abortion debate, particularly when viewed through the skewed, ultra-right-wing lens of Stafford Allen Ray.
Somewhat similarly, Corbin doesn’t shy away from the complexity of Valorie’s relationship with her partner, Detective Robert “Bobby” Grimes, and the kind of casual sexism that she witnesses and experiences on a daily basis. For example, “Grimes was her senior partner and a mentor of sorts, with tons of valuable experience for her to learn from. But he could be a real dinosaur at times. She hoped that wouldn’t become an obstacle to them working together.” Still, the partnership works on a practical level and, as the story progresses, things coalesce more on an emotional and intellectual level too. In raising the specter of misogyny and sexism, Corbin highlights the destructive nature of hate.
Under the Banner of Valor is a neatly twisting detective story featuring several strands of criminal chicanery, any number of nefarious individuals, and one kick-ass police officer on the case.
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