Grant Cogar is a reporter.

An old-school reporter–the kind you see characterized on movies and TV but hasn’t dominated actual journalism probably since WWII: he reports the facts regardless of how they relate to whatever political worldview he subscribes to (which he also keeps to himself). And yet he is decent and passionate about humanity.

That passion collides with Cogar’s objectivity and, in this novel, we find him waist-deep in the chaos that is present-day Syria.

…A knight without armor in a savage land…

That line from the theme to Have Gun, Will Travel fits Cogar’s Crusade pretty well. But it’s worse than that–Sir Cogar has no weapons, either. Oh, they’re available; he just won’t use them in anything but the most desperate of circumstances. Of course desperation is a relative concept when you’re already wading through a civil war. Hint: risk of his own life and limb is not sufficient desperation.

I was here, they were here, and since we weren’t shooting at each other, we must be on the same side. Today.

Cogar is a strange character to find in any generation of men’s adventure. He’d be more at home in a drama that takes place down the street from your urban or suburban reality. Looking at my own characters, pretty much all of them are comfortable with both feeding and cheating death. Cogar may have a remarkable reserve of courage, but his squeamishness at the prospect of dealing out deadly force is more commensurate with yours, your neighbor’s…pretty much any civilian you would classify as “decent folk.”

Granzow’s prose is savvy, ascending to the poetic in places.

…There is no limit to the depth of human depravity, and wars in this part of the world don’t come with expiration dates. The Middle East is an island buoyed by corpses, rocking unsteadily atop a bottomless lake of blood–a lake that Sherman only briefly canoed over during his stint as general. Here, every drop of red spilled in the sand fuels the strife like gasoline on flame…

I prefer the devil-may-care adventurer in most genre fiction of the civilian persuasion, but what Cogar has seen forces him to care. It might force readers to care as well, by proxy.