The Good Lieutenant

Starred review from April 4, 2016
Terrell’s audacious new novel begins with a literal bang as a U.S. Army patrol in Iraq goes terribly wrong for Lt. Emma Fowler, who is present as her secret lover, Lt. Dixon Pulowski, is critically wounded in an explosion while attempting to recover the corpse of a kidnapped sergeant. The narrative moves in reverse chronological order from there, to show the events before the botched operation, depicting the previous op that got the sergeant abducted at Muthanna intersection, an IED explosion at the same intersection that cost the lives of two soldiers earlier, a bad call made by the colonel who declared the intersection safe, and Fowler’s stateside training, where she begins her love affair with Pulowski. Although this backward conceit has been used before, as in the Christopher Nolan film Memento and the Harold Pinter play Betrayal, it works particularly well in this story, which employs the structure to critique the follies of the Iraq War and the adamantine nature of the military mind-set. Terrell (The King of Kings County) shows us how soldiers think and address one another with a stinging combination of military argot and pop culture references. The book’s last line echoes the title of one of the first novels about modern warfare, Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat (1923), to which this novel is an entirely worthy successor. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins Associates.

This audiobook about a female lieutenant's trial by fire in Iraq proceeds from the present to the past--not in typical flashback mode but as a completely linear backwards movement through time. This structure makes it difficult to follow the characters' development. One might have expected a female narrator for this book, but, not to worry, narrator Jeffrey Kafer delivers Emma's voice well. He also does a decent job of dramatizing her personality in this sometimes-confusing m�lange. Occasionally, he seems to be trying to sound too portentous, and it works only in small doses. Otherwise, his pacing and timing are good, and the complex emotional landscapes he paints are often heartrending. M.C. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine