The Officers' Club
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Spring, 1981. Vietnam is over, but the repercussions linger. The military strives to recover as society reels from the excesses of the 1970s…A sinister beauty and a dutiful soldier… a Hollywood lawyer running from a dirty past and a cast-off vet who seems to have no future… dueling drug gangs along the Mexican border… and the mutilated remains of a female lieutenant. Stunning, promiscuous, and brilliant at spotting the weaknesses in others, Jessie Lamoureaux may have been killed by a jealous lover, a drug smuggler—or a ghost from a life she hoped she had left behind. Was her murderer the Green Beret she betrayed? The captain whose marriage she shattered? The senior officer hoping to save her from herself? A female sergeant fighting for dignity in a man’s world? Or a fellow lieutenant with a secret of his own?In this gritty tale of young men and women torn between the laws of the land and the laws of the heart, a dark journey leads from a moonlit beach in Mexico to mayhem in Iran—then back to a country looking for its soul.The Officers’ Club captures the passions and confusion of the times, the reckoning due after a decade of indulgence—and the commitment of those who stayed in uniform through the bad years.As the military and society struggle to right themselves, their conflicts are embodied in the question: Who killed Lieutenant Jessie Lamoureux? Publishers WeeklyThe murder of 1st Lt. Jessica Lamoureux at Arizona's Fort Huachuca kick-starts Peters's excellent mystery thriller set in the post-Vietnam era. Roy Banks, a 28-year-old army second lieutenant, is finishing a course in military intelligence by designing a war game exercise, but the real games are those played by his fellow officers who are members of what they jokingly refer to as "the Officers' Club," a hard-drinking, promiscuous group who spend their free time in various bars and bedrooms. Late one night, a skinny-dipping Lamoureux tries to seduce Banks, who's sleeping with a married female second lieutenant. Much to his own surprise, Banks fends her off, which proves to be one of the few astute choices he makes in a novel filled with men and women making all the wrong decisions. Peters (The War After Armageddon) shows he can explore the conundrums of love and the battlefield of the human heart as successfully as he navigates international military strategy and tactics. (Jan.)
