Fort: A Novel

Former Army officer and current Pentagon lawyer, John Renehan’s new thriller featuring a caustic army investigator with an allergy to authority, who’s out to solve a series of murders on a military base in Alaska.

Lee Nestor was a soldier once, but now he puts them in jail.

After witnessing a war crime in Afghanistan that he couldn’t stop, he left the Army and has spent the last fourteen years as a Criminal Investigation Division detective, making it his life’s work to set things right where he could. He never imagined doing anything else, until a drunk driver took his wife from him, leaving Nestor and fifteen-year-old Allie to pick up the pieces together, and causing Nestor to question whether he can keep doing a dangerous job that might leave Allie alone in the world.

But when nineteen-year-old soldier Felicia Morales disappears from a bar in Juneau, Alaska, and her story blows up in the national media, Nestor is recalled from desk duty and dispatched to Fort Barrent—a.k.a. “The Fort,” a remote backwater in the mountains above Juneau where the Army stashes away those who can’t succeed anywhere else. The military police there have classified the Morales case as a run-of-the-mill desertion, but things have been changing at The Fort with the arrival of a new brigade of infantrymen and their hyperaggressive commander, straining the Army’s relationship with the town and causing Nestor to suspect foul play.

He finds the base transformed from a sleepy backwater to a secretive redoubt where bizarre training methods reign, and after being stonewalled by the commander and his obsequious executive officer, Nestor teams up with Cara Fitzpatrick, a local cop who’s convinced that Morales’s disappearance is tied to Juneau’s festering drug trade. Together they work their way through a rich cast of characters—including the flamboyant local drug lord, a barely employed newspaper reporter who’s obsessed with a series of soldier deaths in town, and Morales’s imperious mother who has commandeered the national media to her purposes—and ultimately discover a serial killer hiding in plain sight in this frozen corner of Alaska.