Nicholas Petrie’s, THE DRIFTER (G.P. Putnam’s Sons; Publication), offers a trenchant exploration of the shattered lives of returning veterans, wrapped in the cloak of a riveting thriller. This literary page-turner pits Peter Ash, a damaged veteran of the wars Afghanistan and Iraq, against a criminal web in contemporary Milwaukee. Waging a different kind of battle within, Peter tries to put his own tenuous life together. In an attempt to tune out the noise in his own head, he offers help to the widow of his best friend from the battlefield—an act of expiation that turns deadly.

“With THE DRIFTER, Nicholas Petrie has written just about the perfect thriller,” says New York Times bestselling author JOHN LESCROART. “I haven’t read such a well-crafted and gripping story in a month of Sundays.”
“A timely, intelligent thriller, as much an indictment as a gripping page-turner." OWEN LAUKKANEN, author of The Stolen Ones
“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."—DAVID BALDACCI, New York Times-bestselling author of Memory Man

More on the book: Peter is living in self-imposed isolation in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest when he gets the news that his comrade-in-arm, Jimmy Johnson, has committed suicide. Heading to Jimmy’s hometown of Milwaukee, Peter invents a story for Jimmy’s widow, Dinah, telling her he has been sent by the Marines as part of a veteran’s benefit program to offer survivors help with home repairs. Under the watchful eye of Jimmy’s young son, Peter sets to work replacing the crumbling porch of Dinah’s house—and capturing and taming the junkyard dog that has taken up residence beneath it. The rotting structure harbors all manner of detritus, including an old suitcase. Peter is shocked to discover the valise is filled with $400,000 is freshly stacked bills and some plastic explosives. Dinah has one hunch about the origins of the money, but when she and Peter head to a dangerous neighborhood to try to return it, her theory proves wrong. Their attempt to track down whomever is behind this clearly illegal cache grows more and more complicated—and perilous—at each unexpected turn. Peter uncovers a complex web of criminal activity. And, always battling the white static in his head, he is thrust back into memories and situations that he had hoped he had left behind in war zones halfway around the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nicholas Petrie received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington. He 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 Seattle Review. A husband and father, he runs a home appraisal business in Milwaukee.