Sometimes a soldier fights his toughest battles after he comes home from war. That’s the predicament facing ex–U.S. Army Ranger Brett Moore in Christopher Irons’ riveting thriller Reclaiming Our Own.

Irons knows about the things that haunt veterans from his own Army service in the 1990s. He wasn’t in the Rangers, the elite special operations forces regiment that conducts raids, rescues, and reconnaissance, but he knew men who were.

“When I was stationed in Korea, I got to know them after work, had beers with them, and heard [their] stories,” Irons recalls. “Brett is modeled after a friend of mine who would talk about his combat struggles and how he dealt with the memories. Unfortunately, he lost his battle with PTSD and took his own life.” Brett is also shadowed by traumatic memories of a mission to protect a foreign leader and his family during a civil war, an operation that ended in shocking violence that he participated in.

Irons wrote the first chapters of Reclaiming Our Own in 1997 while he was in the Army. He put it away while he built a career as an information technology consultant and CIO, which honed his ability to write about technical subjects for nontechnical people. “That allowed me to flow into fiction writing,” he notes. “Plotting and outlining seemed pretty easy because of that.” He took up the novel again in 2018 and set about depicting the very technical world of the Rangers.

Reclaiming Our Own opens with Brett on an outing to an Arkansas mall with his wife, Riley, and his brother Ethan’s family, having put his past behind him. But suddenly he spies his 2-year-old nephew, Cameron, and another child being kidnapped and also gets abducted when he intervenes.

Brett finds himself imprisoned on a farm, bloody and bruised. Meanwhile, his Army buddy Wade Scott is running the FBI’s investigation into the abductions. Wade summons Brett’s old Ranger squad, all of them now civilians, to dust off their gear and help out. Then things get complicated: Riley is kidnapped, and Wade learns that the abductions are part of a plot—with tentacles reaching into the government and even the FBI­—to engineer political assassinations.

The novel unfolds as a crackerjack thriller as Brett escapes, rejoins his old team, and leads their mission to find the captive kids, free Riley, and take down the widening conspiracy. The result is an action-packed Ranger operation that feels sharply observed and convincing—and for good reason. 

“I had some Ranger friends who let me do advanced training drills with them on weekends, and most of the close-quarters fighting in the book came from what I saw there,” Irons explains. As in the novel, the drills often involved nerve-wracking assaults on labyrinthine buildings. “First they said, ‘Try the exercises,’ then they said, ‘We’re going to put a couple of bad guys in here now that you don’t know about.’ You turn a corner and there’s a guy standing there with a gun in your face. It was quite a rush.”

But for all its energetic storytelling and intricate procedural, Reclaiming Our Own is as much a psychological novel about people under terrible strain because of the things they have to do. That’s not unusual among veterans, Irons says. “When you sign up, you take an oath to get the mission done, and sometimes you may not like what’s happening. You don’t have to take a life or see one taken to develop some sort of guilt about what you’re involved in.”

That dynamic especially affects Brett as the urgency of his mission and his fears for Cameron and Riley reawaken the long-buried ruthlessness and bloodlust that war fostered in him, a readiness to take lives when it may not be necessary. “I needed to show how volatile Brett was as a character, to show what he was capable of,” says Irons of the conflict in his hero’s soul that centers the novel.

Irons’ handling of this material has won plaudits from Kirkus Reviews, which calls Reclaiming Our Own “a fast-paced, suspenseful story” and praises its “succinct, unadorned prose” and complex characterizations. Irons’ grittily realistic writing and pitch-perfect dialogue conveys deep currents of meaning beneath plainspoken observations, as in this confrontation between Brett and his nemesis, a Ranger vet known only as Jack who’s part of the conspiracy and uncannily aware of Brett’s dark deeds in uniform:

“You would do anything to keep your mind from going back to that time. That’s a nasty piece of work you put in over there. That’s the kind of work that keeps you up at night.” Jack pauses for a moment. “I especially like the knife work. Tell me, did you run out of ammo, or did you just want to get up close and personal?”

But while there’s grimness in Reclaiming Our Own, there’s also potential for redemption. Unusually for a thriller author, Irons develops that by anchoring his characters to rich, captivating family lives. (“Brett, you should try dealing with five sick kids that all have the runs,” grouses one Ranger-turned-stay-at-home dad. “That was worse than the nastiest jungle we ever had to wade through.”)

“I felt that the rough, alcoholic loner character had been overdone,” says Irons. “I wanted to show the real side of these guys. When you go through the kind of things they’ve been through, focusing on your family becomes the key to your life.”

Irons plans to continue taking his characters in unexpected directions in two sequels to Reclaiming Our Own. “I’m going to focus on Riley, who’s developed PTSD after her ordeal. I’m going to put her in law enforcement. She’s not going to be the ‘walk up and punch a man and knock him out’ type, but she’ll do her own thing, be emotionally involved, and be strong. The challenges of writing a female lead are going to be tough, which makes it an interesting thing to do.” 

Irons hopes that by writing about characters with mental health issues he can spur discussion. “Our society talks a good talk about PTSD but sees it mainly as an inconvenience. I’d like to raise awareness.” Beyond that, he’s betting that his fresh take on the thriller genre will spell long-term success and has a marketing budget to help make that happen. That aspiration animates his essay-blog, Pants Free For Life, whose title refers to the abolition of office attire. “That’s the goal, to stop going to work. Staying home to write is absolutely what I’d love to do.”

Will Green is a writer in New York.