This debut novel offers a trenchant exploration of the shattered lives of returning veterans, wrapped in the cloak of a riveting thriller. The literary page-turner pits Peter Ash, a damaged veteran of the wars Afghanistan and Iraq, against a criminal web in contemporary Milwaukee. Waging a different kind of battle within, Peter tries to put his own tenuous life together. In an attempt to tune out the noise in his own head, he offers help to the widow of his best friend from the battlefield — an act of expiation that turns deadly. New York Times best-selling author Steve Barry describes it as a “tangled tale of intrigue, action, and adventure with a battle-scarred hero who definitely rises to the challenge.”

Author Petrie received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington, won a Hopwood Award for short fiction while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and his story “At the Laundromat” won the 2006 Short Story Contest in The Seattle Review, a national literary journal. A husband and father, he runs a home-inspection business in Milwaukee.