Ron Childress's And West Is West combines 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 in Afghanistan, she hesitates. Two young girls are in the targeted convoy. After she follows through with the shot, she confesses all in a letter to her incarcerated father, but the Air Force gets tipped off about the confidential information, leading to Jessica's discharge. Soon she finds herself pursued by federal agents.
Ethan Winter is a Wall Street quant who happened to come up with an algorithm predicting terrorism's effect on currency rates. After his girlfriend, Zoe, leaves him to work for a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., Ethan inadvertently becomes the keeper of her family secrets, and 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. 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. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads