The Sandbox

This "gripping" and suspenseful novel of the Iraq War "will keep you turning the pages" (The New York Times).
 
Operating Base Cornucopia is a three-hundred-year-old fortress in the remote Iraqi desert where a few dozen soldiers wait for their next assignment, among them Pvt. Toby Durrant, a self-described "broke nobody."
 
Then a deadly ambush touches off events that put Durrant in the middle of a far-reaching conspiracy. Insurgents massing in the nearby hills, a secretive member of military intelligence, an abandoned toy factory, and a mysterious, half-feral child--Durrant must figure out the links between them if he's to survive. This blistering look at military life in "the sandbox" of Iraq is both a compelling mystery and a vivid evocation of an "isolated moonscape--a place as liable to produce hallucinations and heat exhaustion as it is to churn up sandstorms that last for days" (Los Angeles Times).