The Good Lieutenant

"A bitter, sly, heartbreaking story of well-meant but ill-fated intentions, and of a battlefield incident that wreaks havoc on the lives that converge, or end, there." New Yorker
The Good Lieutenant literally starts with a bang as an operation led by Lieutenant Emma Fowler of the Twenty-seventh Infantry Battalion goes spectacularly wrong. Men are dead - one, a young Iraqi, by her hand. Others were soldiers in her platoon. And the signals officer, Dixon Pulowski. Pulowski is another story entirely - Fowler and Pulowski had been lovers since they met at Fort Riley in Kansas.
From this conflagration, The Good Lieutenant unspools backward in time as Fowler and her platoon are guided into disaster by suspicious informants and questionable intelligence, their very mission the result of a previous snafu in which a soldier had been kidnapped by insurgents. And then even further back, before things began to go so wrong, we see the backstory unfold from points of view that usually are not shown in war coverage - a female frontline officer, for one, but also jaded career soldiers and Iraqis both innocent and not so innocent. Ultimately, as all these stories unravel, what is revealed is what happens when good intentions destroy, experience distorts, and survival becomes everything.
The Good Lieutenant is a brilliantly told and expertly captured novel by a terrific writer at the top of his form.
MORE PRAISE FOR THE GOOD LIEUTENANT
"The best novel to have come out of the Bush wars" Guardian (US)
"An addicting epic about disaster and, more important, what leads to disaster" Washington Post
"A stunning and heartbreaking testament to Terrell's genius and the nature of modern war." Gillian Flynn
"Terrell shows us how soldiers think and address one another with a stinging combination of military argot and pop culture references." Publisher's Weekly
"The Good Lieutenant is not the first novel written about the Iraq War, but [it is] one of the most unique and deeply felt" Men's Journal