Fire in the Blood
A Novel
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“A tremendously compelling debut of rare skill” (Phil Klay, author of Redeployment) about a soldier who goes AWOL from Afghanistan and returns home to unravel the mystery of his wife’s death.
When Coop—a U.S. Army paratrooper serving in Afghanistan—is called urgently to his Captain’s office, he fears he’s headed for a court martial. Coop has been keeping a terrible secret from his fellow soldiers, and worries he’s been discovered. Instead, his life is devastated in a different way: his wife, Kay, has been killed in a hit-and-run.
Given a brief leave to fly back to New York and attend to Kay’s affairs, Coop is increasingly disturbed by the suspicious circumstances of his wife’s death. He decides to go AWOL, using his military training to uncover the real story behind Kay’s fatal accident. As he circles in on the truth, Coop must distinguish ally from enemy among a cast of players in the Bronx underworld: Albanian heroin smugglers, shady cops, corrupt rehab doctors, and his wife’s family, a powerful clan of financial elites. Navigating this new battlefield, he’ll have to find justice for Kay while also seeking his own redemption.
Humming with mystery and grief, Fire in the Blood is a compulsively readable thriller about the wars we fight, whether overseas, in our city streets, or in the depths of our own hearts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
