Just Finished Reading The Right Side by Spencer Quinn

In Spencer Quinn's 2017 novel The Right Side (which I just finished reading), LeeAnne Hogan is a young soldier returning from multiple tours in Afghanistan...this time it is because she has been seriously injured in a blown operation...or was it a betrayal from the inside?  In any event, after staying in a German hospital she is now at Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, trying to come to grips with the difficult fact that she has lost her right eye and the face immediately around it is horribly scarred.  LeeAnne's attitude is bitter and hard toward those around her, including her psychiatrist, for whom she reserves a higher degree of animosity than the others.  But he knows that there is more to her injury: there is shrapnel lodged within her brain, inoperable, and this may pose a major problem to their plans for her eventual recovery from this ordeal.  There is one person at Bethesda, though, who has befriended LeeAnne: her roommate there, Marci...also a victim of war. For her this occurred in Iraq when she lost a leg to an IED (improvised explosive device) while driving a truck.  The two bond and LeeAnne learns of Marci's life, including that she has an eight-year-old daughter living with Marci's mother.  Marci tragically dies from a sudden infection and LeeAnne has had enough of the hospital life:  she sneaks out and heads west with the intention of finding her friend's family in northwestern Washington state.  Meanwhile, a military investigator is seeking her out to return to Kabul and help him solve the mystery surrounding the debacle that had cost her eye and the lives of several others.  I'm not giving away the story by relating all this...this happens as a background story to LeeAnne's experiences as she seeks some kind of inner peace about her life as it seems to have become completely unraveled...

At a crucial stage in her journey LeeAnne encounters a large stray dog that seems to have an instinctive sense of protectiveness exclusively for her, even knowing to stay on her right side where she is essentially blind due to her missing eye.  Never a dog lover, LeeAnne tries to get rid of it to no avail...Goody, which she later names it, becomes an important character in her story.  And Marci's daughter Mia is another...except that she has gone missing...

With The Right Side we have a painfully close examination of the soul of a proud and injured veteran as she faces the rest of her life traumatized, disfigured and partially blind...not to mention the searing headaches she suffers, likely from that shrapnel.  How can LeeAnne reconcile her experiences with her life ahead?  Whom can she trust and whom must she avoid?  She is quite a character...I recommend this book if only for that stubborn willfulness and defiance she displays toward others.  Not that I want to adopt Sgt. Hogan's demeanor: a lot of it is based, I think, on erroneous conclusions she has made about the intentions and attitudes those around her have for her...something that this story also brings out.  I also liked the story itself, with the mysteries about Mia and the Afghanistan tragedy drawing me to its conclusion.  I've never read anything from Spencer Quinn before, but I understand that much of his fiction is of a more lighthearted and humorous nature.  Still, I think I'll poke around some of his books and see how they stack up to The Right Side, which I heartily recommend...and also which just might be the start of a series (I hope so)...