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.

April 1, 2016
A glimpse of the war in Iraq, as told by the acclaimed author of The King of Kings County (2005) and The Huntsman (2001). As this novel begins, Lt. Emma Fowler is leading her platoon on a recovery mission. Sgt. Carl Beale is already dead; her team is trying recover his corpse. Beneath the veneer of confidence necessary to command, Fowler is plagued by doubts and anxieties--about the interrogation methods used to locate Beale's body, about the probable connection between such abuses and the betrayal that led to Beale's death, about signal officer Dixon Pulowski and whether or not she can trust him to keep quiet about the possibility of torture, about the probability of keeping her lover--Pulowski again--safe during this mission....And then everything really goes to hell. Terrell is a journalist as well as a novelist. He was an embedded reporter between 2006 and 2010, and he covered the war in Iraq for the Washington Post Magazine, Slate, and NPR. Clearly, he has an informed perspective on this particular conflict, and anyone who has read his previous fiction will be inclined to trust him as a narrator. This makes his latest novel all the more baffling. From the very beginning, it's difficult to understand what's happening where and when and why. And this isn't just fog-of-war-style confusion. Even outside the action, it's difficult for the reader to find his or her bearings. For example, even before the first chapter reaches its awful conclusion, it's already confusing: what's the relationship between Fowler's platoon and a patrol already on duty there? Is it important that Pulowski is installing cameras at this rural location? Are the cameras as important as the recovery of Beale's body? Are they more important? Terrell's choice to create a narrative that moves backward in time means that readers have to carry these questions with them as they read and hope for answers. As a metaphor for the latest Gulf War, this might make sense. But it makes for a very challenging novel. Informed witness; overly complicated storytelling.

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May 15, 2016
Terrell (The King of Kings County, 2005) imaginatively assesses the cost of an IED explosion by telling the stories of the concussed backwards from the moment of the blast. The ranking officer in the Humvee is Lieutenant Emma Fowler, whose professional dutiesand personal loyaltieshave led her platoon to the fields behind a suspicious house deep in Iraqi backcountry in search of Sergeant Beale, who disappeared in a moment of questionable judgment. Attached to the gearshift are steel shackles, a souvenir of a more innocent moment in Fowler's career; manacled beneath the dashboard is Pulowski, Fowler's signal officer and sometime lover who, like Fowler, left Kansas to escape family dysfunction. Reveling in earthy banter and gritty details, Terrell offers grim realism. But much of the novel's war-story bravado is undone by its reverse chronology, which cleverly destabilizes expectations of closure, sidelining questions about the who, what, when of Fowler's failed raid to raise more difficult questions about the meaning of it all. The result is a sad and memorable tale of thwarted optimism, incomplete intimacy, and collateral damage.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2016

Lt. Emma Fowler is a young platoon leader struggling with doubts and insecurities as she learns to lead a group of soldiers battling their own personal issues in this unusually inward-looking novel of the Iraq War. It begins at a decisive moment, when a troubled soldier from the platoon, Carl Beale, is killed during a mission to fortify a dangerous intersection. From there, the story takes us back through the events and the complexities of the human relationships that led to that moment, as Fowler attempts to understand the circumstances surrounding Beale's death--did he deliberately disobey an order by charging into a warehouse?--while struggling with her own guilt at the loss of a soldier in her command. VERDICT This latest book from Terrell (after The King of Kings County) focuses not so much on military action and battle scenes (although those certainly are here) as on the interactions of a group of unheroic individuals thrown into an extreme situation. As such, it can seem somewhat undramatic for a war novel, yet it is exactly these confrontations among and within individuals that give the story its power and appeal. [See Prepub Alert, 11/30/15.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2016

Terrell debuted in 2001 with The Huntsman, a New York Times Notable Book, and followed up with the well-reviewed The King of Kings County. During 2006 and 2010, he was an embedded reporter in Iraq. This new novel opens with Lt. Emma Fowler of the Twenty-Seventh Infantry Battalion leading an operation that goes blazingly wrong.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.