A compelling emotional suspense by bestselling author Spencer Quinn and his first-ever standalone novel, which also features—in true Quinn fashion—a captivating canine companion named Goody
THE RIGHT SIDE
by Spencer Quinn
Atria, June 2017
Agent: The Friedrich Agency
LeAnne Hogan has returned home from war a different person—both inside and out. Once confident and driven, she is now volatile, sharp-tongued, prone to muddied thinking. Once beautiful, her right eye is now an empty crater, the side of her face horribly scarred. Wracked with guilt over a mission gone wrong, the only solace she finds is with her hospital roommate, Marci, but when the woman unexpectedly dies, LeAnne reaches a breaking point.
Wearing her injury like a gruesome badge of honor, a defiant LeAnne goes AWOL and sets out on a cross-country journey, but the world she encounters is an unfamiliar one, filtered as it is through one good eye with no depth perception, a damaged psyche, and a body in withdrawal from medication. Her bitterness at her disfigurement and the loss of her career eats away at her as she clashes with everyone in her path—family, friends, and strangers alike. LeAnne, in a word, is lost.
Eventually LeAnne finds herself in a rain-soaked small town in Washington state, the very place Marci called home. As she puts down tentative roots LeAnne makes a troubling discovery: Marci’s eight-year-old daughter has vanished. Determined to find her, LeAnne discovers a newfound resolve and a second chance to get things right. And the LeAnne who will emerge at the end of this new mission will not be the one who went off to war nor will she be the shattered woman who returned. She will be someone new.
Unflinching in its depiction of the effects of PTSD, THE RIGHT SIDE introduces the most vivid, inspired, and complex protagonist in recent years, one who will stay with you long after novel’s end.
Spencer Quinn is the author of eight bestselling Chet and Bernie mystery novels as well as the middle grade novels Woof and Arf.