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The Drifter, by Nicholas Petrie
Free Ebook The Drifter, by Nicholas Petrie
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"A stunning debut. Peter Ash is one of the most complex characters I've come across in a long time. The pace is like a sniper round, extraordinarily fast and precisely calibrated. The prose is fluid, original and frequently brilliant, the story heart-wrenching and uplifting at the same time. There is grit in this tale that will stay with you. I eagerly await Nicholas Petrie's next creation.”—David Baldacci, New York Times bestselling author ofMemory Man
An explosive thriller debut introducing Peter Ash, a veteran who finds that the demons of war aren’t easily left behind . . .
Peter Ash came home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with only one souvenir: what he calls his “white static,” the buzzing claustrophobia due to post-traumatic stress that has driven him to spend a year roaming in nature, sleeping under the stars. But when a friend from the Marines commits suicide, Ash returns to civilization to help the man’s widow with some home repairs. Under her dilapidated porch, he finds more than he bargained for: the largest, ugliest, meanest dog he’s ever encountered . . . and a Samsonite suitcase stuffed with cash and explosives. As Ash begins to investigate this unexpected discovery, he finds himself at the center of a plot that is far larger than he could have imagined . . . and it may lead straight back to the world he thought he’d left for good. Suspenseful and thrilling, and featuring a compelling new hero, The Drifter is an exciting debut from a fresh voice in crime fiction.
Also look for BURNING BRIGHT, coming January 2017 from Nicholas Petrie.
- Sales Rank: #425930 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-12
- Released on: 2016-01-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.31" h x 1.29" w x 6.31" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 384 pages
Review
Advance Praise for The Drifter
“As I was reading Petrie’s exceptional debut, O’Brien’s [The Things They Carried] buzzed at the edges of my consciousness, casting the newer book as a thematic sequel to O’Brien’s classic. . . The Drifter may be about a different war, but it’s about the same hell, and in this book it’s about the things a vet carries home with him. . . . [The] lean prose, gritty descriptions, and raw psychological depth give the novel a feel that reminded me of early Dennis Lehane.”—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“A captivating debut novel . . . [Petrie’s] main character has the capacity to become an action hero of the likes of Jack Reacher or Jason Bourne.”—Lincoln Journal-Star
“A gripping, beautifully written novel.”—Huffington Post
“It’s not hard to see a little of Lee Child’s bestselling hero Jack Reacher in Peter Ash, the hero of [Petrie’s] tightly wound debut thriller . . . What distinguishes The Drifter is its protagonist . . . whereas military service is usually a part of the backstory for most literary detectives, for Ash the experience is still front and center, guiding and defining his actions. War is hell, but Ash managed to adjust to its highs and lows. It’s adjusting back to civilian life that is the tough part. It’s that internal struggle that makes The Drifter such a memorable debut, an exciting thriller that’s also an empathetic character study, one that will ring true for a lot of veterans making that same transition.”—The Capital Times
“A page-turner with a shout-out to vets everywhere, The Drifter is a first-class crime novel set in a second-tier city with plenty of third-rate lowlifes.”—Shelf Awareness
“Superb . . . A tautly written thriller . . . with a convincing plot, mean and nasty and full of real character. Edgy and slowly boiling to a thrilling climax, this book will hold your interest long after a late night of reading.”—Examiner.com
“The Drifter is a stunning debut. Peter Ash is one of the most complex characters I've come across in a long time. The pace is like a sniper round, extraordinarily fast and precisely calibrated. The prose is fluid, original and frequently brilliant, the story heart-wrenching and uplifting at the same time. There is grit in this tale that will stay with you for a long time. Perhaps forever. I eagerly await Nicholas Petrie's next creation.”—David Baldacci, New York Times-bestselling author of Memory Man
“A powerful, empathetic, and entertaining tale about the plight many combat veterans face when they come home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Top-notch storytelling.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“[Peter Ash’s] sharply intelligent, witty voice strikes the right tone for an honest exploration of the challenges returning veterans face, and while this wandering veteran will remind some of Jack Reacher, Peter’s struggle to overcome PTSD sets him apart. An absorbing thriller debut with heart.”—Booklist
“Petrie’s expertly paced plot sets a colorful array of characters on a collision course. Readers will look forward to seeing more of the resourceful Ash.”—Publishers Weekly
“Petrie's impressive debut thriller is fine tuned, the action gripping, and through Ash offers a well-drawn portrait of a vet who can't escape his combat experience. Like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Ash's philosophy of detection is to poke a stick into something and see what happens. His discoveries will keep the reader on edge and whet the appetite for more from this author.”—Library Journal
“The Drifter follows the compelling story of one former Marine’s struggle to reacclimate himself to civilian life while honoring his commitment to a fallen soldier. That alone is reason to keep reading, but Petrie amps up the stakes in surprising fashion, creating a story that is moving, thrilling and satisfying on every level. . . . [An] intimate story of personal discovery as well as an obsessive pageturner of a book.”—BookPage
“With The Drifter, Nicholas Petrie has written just about the perfect thriller. I haven't read such a well-crafted and gripping story in a month of Sundays. If this is Petrie's first novel, watch out for the second one. But why wait? This one's here now, and it's a home run.”—John Lescroart, New York Times-bestselling author of The Keeper
“A tangled tale of intrigue, action, and adventure with a battle-scarred hero who definitely rises to the challenge. The clever plot is firmly conceived and crisp writing makes this a terrific story, told terrifically.”—Steve Berry, New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Myth
“Nicholas Petrie's The Drifter has one of the most thrilling openings I've ever read, involving a dank crawlspace, the nastiest, smelliest dog in creation, and a former Marine lieutenant still suffering from the trauma of his war. It can't get better than this, I figured, but it does. Petrie's novel keeps accelerating even as it burrows ever deeper into the dark heart of the new American dream. It is a sterling debut. And yes, the dog is a star.”—William Lashner, New York Times-bestselling author of The Barkeep
“A timely, intelligent thriller, as much an indictment as a gripping page-turner. Nicholas Petrie’s debut simmers and seethes until it finally boils over in a masterfully-drawn final showdown. Teeming with grit and desperation and told in spare, vivid prose, this is not a debut you’ll want to miss.”—Owen Laukkanen, author of The Stolen Ones
About the Author
NICHOLAS 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 The Seattle Review, a national literary journal. A husband and father, he runs a home-inspection business in Milwaukee. Burning Bright, the follow-up to his debut The Drifter, will be released January 2017.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
There was a pit bull under the front porch and it didn’t want to come out.
Young Charlie Johnson said, “That dang dog’s been there for weeks, sir. It already ate up all the cats and dogs around here. I can’t even let my dang little brother out the front door no more.”
The hundred-year-old house sat on a narrow lot on the edge of a battered Milwaukee neighborhood that, like the house, had seen better days. It was early November, not warm, not even by Wisconsin standards. The leaves had already fallen from the skeletal trees that towered overhead.
But the sun was out, which counted for something. And the sky was a high, pale morning blue. Not a morning for static. Not at all.
Peter Ash said, “Just how big is this dog?”
Charlie shook his head. “Never seen it up close, sir, and never in daylight. But it’s awfully dang big, I can tell you that.”
“Didn’t you call animal control?”
“Oh, my mama called,” said Charlie. “Two men came, took one look under there, got right back in their truck and drove away.”
Charlie wore a school uniform, a light-blue permanent-press dress shirt, dark-blue polyester dress pants, and giant polished black shoes on his oversized feet. He was the kind of skinny, big-eared, twelve-year-old kid who could eat six meals a day and still be hungry.
But his eyes were older than his years. They didn’t miss a thing.
He was watching Peter Ash now.
Peter sat on the closed lid of a wooden toolbox, his wide, knuckly hands on the work-worn knees of his carpenter’s jeans, peering through the narrow access hatch cut into the rotted pine slats enclosing the space under the porch. He had to admit the dog sounded big. He could hear it growling back there in the darkness. Like a tank engine on idle, only louder.
He had a .45 under the seat of his pickup, but he didn’t want to use it. It wasn’t the dog’s fault, not really. It was hungry and scared and alone, and all it had was its teeth.
On the other hand, Peter had told Charlie’s mother, Dinah, that he would fix the rotting supports beneath her ancient porch.
She hadn’t mentioned the dog.
Peter really couldn’t blame her.
Her husband had killed himself.
And it was Peter’s fault.
**
Peter was lean and rangy, muscle and bone, nothing extra. His long face was angular, the tips of his ears slightly pointed, his dark hair the unruly shag of a buzz cut grown wild. He had the thoughtful eyes of a werewolf a week before the change.
Some part of him was always in motion—even now, sitting on that toolbox, peering under that porch, his knee bobbed in time to some interior metronome that never ceased.
He’d fought two wars over eight years, with more deployments than he cared to remember. The tip of the spear. He’d be thirty-one in January.
As he bent to look through the narrow access hatch under the porch, he could feel the white static fizz and pop at the base of his skull. That was his name for the fine-grained sensation he lived with now, the white static. A vague crackling unease, a dissonant noise at the edge of hearing. It wasn’t quite uncomfortable, not yet. The static was just reminding him that it didn’t want him to go inside.
Peter knew it would get worse before he was done.
So he might as well get to it.
The space under the porch was about three feet high. Maybe twelve feet wide and twelve deep, with a dirt floor. About the size of four freshly dug graves, laid sideways. The smell was rank, worse than a sergeant’s feet after two months in a combat outpost. But not as bad as a two-week-old corpse.
Light trickled in through the slatted sides of the porch, but shadows shrouded the far corner, some kind of cast-off crap back there. And that growl he could just about feel through the soles of his boots.
It would be good to do this without being chewed on too much.
He went out to his truck and found a cordless trouble light, some good rope, and a length of old handrail. White oak, an inch and three-quarters thick, maybe eighteen inches long. Nice and solid in the hand. Which was a help when you were contemplating something spectacularly stupid.
Serenaded by the growls from the crawl space, he sat down on the toolbox and took out his knife while young Charlie Johnson watched.
Not that Peter wanted an audience. This certainly could get ugly.
“Don’t you have someplace to go, Charlie? School or something?”
Charlie glanced at a cheap black digital watch strapped to his skinny wrist. “No, sir,” he said. “Not yet I don’t.”
Peter just shook his head. He didn’t like it, but he understood. He figured he wasn’t that far from twelve years old himself.
He cut three short lengths from his rope and left the remainder long, ten or twelve feet. Tied one end of a short piece of rope tight to each end of the oak rail. Looped the last short rope and the remainder through his belt a single time, so he could get at it quickly.
Then he looked up at Charlie again. “You better get out of here, kid. If this goes bad, you don’t want to be around.”
Charlie said, “I’m not a dang kid. Sir. I’m the man of the family.” He reached inside the door, brought out an aluminum baseball bat, and demonstrated his swing. “That’s my dang porch. My little brother, too. I ain’t going nowhere.”
Charlie’s dad always had the same look behind the Humvee’s .50 turret gun. Eyes wide open and ready for trouble. Daring any motherfucker to pop up with an RPG or Kalashnikov or whatever. But when his wife, Dinah, sent cookies, Big Jimmy Johnson—known inevitably to the platoon’s jokers as Big Johnson, or just plain Big—was always the last to eat one.
Peter missed him.
He missed them all. The dead and the living.
He said, “Okay, Charlie. I can respect that.” He put his eyes on the boy and held them there. “But if that dog gets loose you get your butt in that house, you hear me? And if you hit me with that bat I’m going to be seriously pissed.”
“Yessir.” Charlie nodded. “Can’t promise anything, sir. But I’ll do my best.”
Peter smiled to himself. At least the kid was honest.
After that there was nothing more to do but lean back and kick out the slats on one side of the porch, letting in more daylight. The space was still small. The tank engine in the shadows got louder. But no sign of the dog. Must be lurking in that trash pile in the far corner.
Not that it mattered. He wasn’t turning away from the challenge. He was just planning how to succeed.
The familiar taste filled his mouth, a coppery flavor, like blood. He felt the adrenaline lift and carry him forward. It was similar to the static, rising. The body’s preparation for fight or flight. It was useful.
He peered under the porch, and the static rose higher still. The static didn’t care about the snarling dog. It cared about the enclosure. It jangled his nerves, raced his heart, tightened his chest, and generally clamored for his attention. It wanted him to stay outside in the open air, in the daylight.
Breathing deeply, Peter took the piece of oak and banged it on the wood frame of the porch. It rang like a primitive musical instrument.
Despite everything, he was smiling.
“Hey, dog,” he called into the darkness. “Watch your ass, I’m coming in!”
And in he went, headfirst on his elbows and knees, the stick in one hand and the trouble light in the other.
What, you want to live forever?
Most helpful customer reviews
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
I HOPE THIS IS ONLY THE FIRST OF WHAT WILL BE AN OUTSTANDING SERIES
By David Keymer
The hero of this exceptional first novel isn’t Jack Reacher, 6’ 5”, 230 pounds and roaming the country because post-military, he finds he can’t stand to be confined to routine. But it comes as close as anything I’ve read recently, and it’s a d**ned good story with a d**ned good hero. Peter Ash is a veteran of two tours –eight years a lieutenant—in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s home now but left with “white static,” a panic reaction that overwhelms when he’s inside a confined space. So he spends most of his life outdoors now. He hears that his sergeant, Jimmy, has killed himself and he heads east to Minnesota to help Jimmy’s widow: he cons her into believing there’s a government-funded program to do home repairs on veteran’s houses. Then he discovers, under her porch, a vicious dog –kind of a pit bull on steroids—a bag of cash --$400,000—and four sticks of plastique explosive. He doesn’t start out to save the world but his code of ethics, the Marine corps code, won’t let him walk away from his former partner’s widow and things grow steadily gummier. A lot of violence follows. There are truly scary bad guys involved and one super villain who is incredibly skeezy but there are also some good guys, most of whom unfortunately don’t make it out alive. The action rolls along at a fast clip, the tension builds steadily, and it all ends in a satisfying and reasonably realistic rollout. This is the second novel I’ve read right now that simply begs for a sequel. Ash is an appealing hero and the information about PTSD is right on the mark.
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
White static
By Cheryl Stout
I loved this book. This first-time author did a super job with character development, especially of protagonist Peter Ash. Peter is a Marine back on U.S. soil after eight years in the military in "lovely" locales like Iraq and Afghanistan.
He is suffering from PTSD in the form of "white static" - extreme claustrophobia and panic attacks anytime he's in a building for more than a couple of minutes. He sleeps under the stars or in his truck, trying to get by and get better.
He ends up going to Milwaukee after one of his best friends from the Marines commits suicide. He wants to help the man's family. And he ends up being in the middle of one big mess.
He finds a suitcase with money and explosives under the man's porch along with one humongous smelly dog and he finds himself being noticed by all the wrong people.
Super storyline, fast paced action, good guys, bad guys, a beautiful widow and adorable kids - and a devilishly dangerous plot that Peter needs to stop.
My one negative - probably 7/8 of the book was stellar. But the last bit of the story was a tad jumbled and didn't seem to have the same momentum as the rest of the story.
So if I could I would have probably rated this 4 1/2 stars.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A Thought-Provoking Action-Packed Thriller!
By R. A. Barricklow(Scaramouche)
As I was reading The Drifter I thought this is old-fashion writing where the characters grab the reader into their world of seamless turning pages.
For example Peter/was lean and rangy, muscle and bone, nothing extra. His long face was angular, the tips of his ears slightly pointed, his dark hair the unruly shag of a buzz cut grown wild. He had the thoughtful eyes of a werewolf a week before the change.
The descriptions brought the reader in with the characters/It was dark and musty under the porch, the smell of weeds and forgotten things, with an animal stink on top. Not a dog smell, but something wilder. Something feral. The smell of monsters in the oldest of fairy tales, the ones where the monsters sometimes won.
This last description is an omen of the monsters coming. Real monsters in our modern day world. The financial terrorists we term Bankers/...my pension lost most of its value. My retirement savings dropped with the market. I haven't been able to find a new job... My husband would roll over in his grave with all these bank bailouts, these executives getting their bonuses, while hard working people lose their homes and children go hungry....Modern banks have wrecked the economy. They've grown so large they gamble everything on a roll of the dice...They're sucking the money out of the middle class. They're set up now just to profit themselves, rather than facilitate production and innovation, which is the role they're designed to perform. Something has to change.
This is what Peter Ash stumbles into when he himself tries to change. To right a wrong done to a fellow soldier. He is under the house of a suicide veteran soldier, fixing it when he stumbles on $400, 000 dollars in tightly packed stacks of hundred dollar bills.
This is an up-to-date thriller that is not only an exciting page-turner but a thought-provoking novel of our times; asking the question of what do we, as a people do: when they break the social contract?
See all 148 customer reviews...
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