The winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Ron Childress's first novel pulls together operations in the military and on Wall Street for a look at the disastrous consequences of getting caught up in a corrupt system.
When Jessica Aldridge, an Air Force drone pilot in Nevada, receives the order to fire a missile at a terrorist leader 8,000 miles away in Afghanistan, she hesitates. She joined the military to help combat terrorism, but she sees two young girls in the targeted convoy. After she follows through with the shot, her guilt leads her to confess all in a letter to her incarcerated father, but an alert prison guard tips off the Air Force about the confidential information, leading to Jessica's discharge. Soon she finds herself pursued by federal agents, as her knowledge about the drone strike proves more sensitive than anyone could have predicted.
Ethan Winter's friends call him a mathematical genius, but Ethan insists he's just a Wall Street quant who happened to come up with an algorithm predicting terrorism's effect on currency rates. Average in looks and a workaholic, Ethan's worries that his girlfriend, Zoe, does not love him seem to bear out when she leaves him to work for a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. However, when Ethan inadvertently becomes the keeper of Zoe's family secrets, the resultant chain of events distracts him long enough for a coworker to sabotage his algorithm; Ethan loses his job and is left adrift.
Although Childress initially appears to be setting up a political thriller, what evolves is a more personal exploration of life in the wake of colossal mistakes. Regardless of whether the reader considers Ethan's and Jessica's mistakes to be allowing their emotional lives to interfere with their professional decisions or entering into morally ambiguous occupations in the first place, sympathizing with their attempts to dig out of their situations is easy. While Jessica flees for her life, certain the government will make her disappear if she is caught, Ethan lets denial swallow him, continuing to pursue Zoe as well as a dead-end lawsuit against his former employers. Their stories intersect in startling ways, proving that despite the artificial moral distance created by the technology each of them used in their professions, the world remains filled with human connections. Centered on ethical questions but never preachy, Childress's narrative ponders the meaning of conscience in a technocentric world. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads
Shelf Talker: A Wall Street quantitative analyst and an Air Force drone pilot face harsh realities when they become scapegoats and lose their jobs.