In Snyder’s novel, a U.S. Air Force airman survives the Vietnam War and is sent to Germany, where he falls in love with a girl pictured on a billboard.

Although he was shot up severely enough in Vietnam to be offered a medical discharge, 20-something Chris Adams is still trying to make sense of his life, so he asks to be transferred to Germany—trading a hot war for a cold one. In his new posting, he’s part of a detail that’s keeping electronic tabs on the Soviets. Before he gets to the U.S. Air Force base, he sees a photo of a ravishing young girl on a billboard alongside the autobahn, and later, he runs into her in a local nightclub. After a rocky start, they grow close and fall in love. Nikolina “Nikki” von Lotzenburg is a successful model who’s 17 and troubled. Her complicated mother and creepy stepfather have taken charge of her career. Snyder’s novel starts out with standard-issue carping about military life but turns into a gripping love story. The effective way that the affair toggles between joy and despair is a credit to the author’s remarkable skill as a writer. Along the way, readers get some wonderful backstories, with many rooted in the turmoil in Germany through World War I, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and World War II. The book has some memorable characters, including the cynical and wise German Bernhard Becker, who’s Chris’ good friend, and his barracks mates, who cover their fierce brotherhood with wisecracks. Becker delivers an eloquent and frightening explanation of Hitler’s rise, and the novel’s account of Nikki’s mother’s background, involving a powerful Prussian family fleeing the Soviets after the Reich’s defeat, is sobering in its portrayal of how people can be reduced overnight from haughty aristocrats to dog-eat-dog survivors. Time and again, readers are reminded that ideas and actions have consequences, and that history is often a self-inflicted wound—and one that’s often septic.

A powerful book in which grimness and lyricism fight to a draw.

Snyder’s (American Warrior, 2004) gritty, unapologetically violent work of crime fiction follows a trio of criminals after they break out of prison.

Oreny “Big” Johnson is an inmate at Horseneck Bay, a level-four, high-security prison facility located in the northwest corner of Washington state. His incarcerated cronies call him “old man,” but he finds out that he has less than a year to live, due to terminal cancer. Johnson, a former celebrated saxophonist whose career and personal life were destroyed by drugs and violence, vows to somehow escape prison, locate approximately $2 million that a former cellmate told him was buried in a remote location in Texas, and die a free (and rich) man. He masterminds an ingenious escape plan that ultimately succeeds in freeing himself and two others: Luke Halprin, an aspiring chef doing time after becoming entangled in his roommate’s drug-dealing operation; and Jaime Torrance, a 17-year old Native American “half-breed” who’s in prison for murder. All three escapees have very different motivations: Johnson wants to die on his own terms, Halprin wants to be reunited with the woman he loves, and Torrance wants to escape the sexual torture of a psychotic corrections officer named Cade. But their already perilous cross-country journey becomes more complicated when they realize that Cade is inexplicably hot on their trail. Although the narrative is shockingly graphic in places and revolves around decidedly unethical characters, it also maintains a powerful introspective undertone throughout. Snyder excellently contrasts Johnson’s spiritual journey of self-acceptance and Cade’s murderous rampage and trail of bloodshed, making both storylines that much more intense. Simultaneously brutal, bloody and beatific, this is crime fiction done right.

A relentlessly paced, unpredictable page-turner powered by well-developed characters.

In this military thriller, a boy grows to maturity with violence, first at home, as its victim, and, finally, through martial arts and the military, as its master.

As a child in the 1960s, Paul Brett was often beaten by his vicious, drunk father. On his paper route he meets a man named Draeger, who teaches him pentjak silat—Indonesian martial arts. By the end of high school, Paul masters the techniques of this discipline. A run-in with the law leads him to enlist in the Army. He ends up in Vietnam with the Green Berets, operating secretly behind enemy lines in Laos. One mission goes horribly wrong; Paul goes AWOL, but he’s captured and thrown into a military prison in Maine, where he has to fight for his life to survive. This book is hard to put down, and at times, especially during scenes set in Vietnam, the realism is startling and palpable. The challenges of Paul’s life—emotional, physical and psychological—are compelling. First-time novelist Snyder uses a spare, direct vocabulary for the action scenes, though he sometimes switches to an elevated tone (“fathomless despair,” “mother’s watery womb”) that jars. And there are narrative gaps. After Paul begins his martial arts training, any mention of his home life ceases until many years have passed, including a pivotal incident when he first confronts his father’s abuse. After Draeger dies, Paul drops martial arts, an important part of his identity, and pentjak silat isn’t mentioned again until he is in prison, many years later. The fight scenes at the prison mostly take the form of visions, presented via various images, but are sketched with too little description of the physical confrontations.

A fast-paced, sometimes uneven, thoroughly engrossing story of a journey through pain and violence.