Fire in the Blood

Starred review from June 22, 2020
Set in 2003, O’Brien’s impressive debut charts a soldier’s dogged search for the truth about his estranged wife’s death. Specialist Cooper, who’s been assigned to find hidden munitions in Afghanistan, is stunned when word reaches him that his wife, social worker Katherine Bellante, has been killed in the Bronx by a hit-and-run driver. With time running out before her funeral, and military bureaucracy moving slowly, Cooper goes AWOL so he can attend the service. In New York City, Cooper learns that the police are still investigating Katherine’s death and that she had been working at a rehab facility in the Bronx. At the facility, he’s puzzled by the removal of Katherine’s files by one of the doctors in charge. The revelation in the first chapter that Katherine was struck by a car in which an Albanian drug dealer was riding, along with a person he believed cheated him and had just abducted, heightens the suspense as Cooper relies on his professional skills to find out what happened. Fans of Nick Petrie’s Peter Ash novels will be pleased. Agent: Nathaniel Jacks, Inkwell Management.

July 10, 2020

DEBUT Coop, a soldier serving in Afghanistan, learns his wife, Kay, has died in a hit-and-run accident. He is granted leave and flies to New York to attend to her affairs but finds the reception from Kay's family cold and distant. A mysterious visitor at the funeral leads him to suspect that Kay's death was not accidental. Utilizing his military training and instincts, Coop chooses to abandon his return to Afghanistan and instead embarks on his own mission to uncover the truth. As he moves deeper into the unknown aspects of his wife's life, Coop is haunted by memories from his military service, and the final days with Kay before deployment. Facing numerous obstacles along the way, including a drug gang and an unreliable detective, Coop must unravel truth from lies to grasp the redemption he's been seeking all along. In addition to his background as a soldier in Afghanistan, debut author O'Brien's ability to express the human experience of inner turmoil and atonement, revenge and justice, displays his powerful and engaging talent as a writer. VERDICT Fans of Michael Connelly's "Harry Bosch" series will appreciate Coop's brusque, principled personality. [See Prepub Alert, 1/29/20.]--Carmen Clark, Elkhart P.L., IN

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2020
O'Brien draws on his own military background (he served with the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan) in this compelling debut mystery. He presents two main characters whose every move and perception has been shaped by wartime: the hero, Coop, whose role as a sapper is to hunt for hidden munitions, and the Albanian-born Kosta, who transfers what he learned about stealth tactics as a youth fighting against the Communists to the vicious drug world of the Bronx. Specialist Coop is serving in Afghanistan when he's sent home for his wife's funeral. Coop suspects that his wife didn't just die in an accident, as claimed, but that she was murdered. O'Brien ably plays on the ticking clock here: Coop needs to get to the bottom of what was going on with his wife and her work at a drug clinic before his leave is up. Harrowing connections are made to financial scammers, the Italian Mafia, and the sadists controlling street sales, along with equally harrowing glances back at Coop's adventures in the Afghan desert.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)