Excerpt from Deception Cove by Owen Laukkanen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Except she wasn't over there anymore. She was here, America, home, sacked out on the couch under a Pendleton blanket, the TV blaring infomercials, and God only knew what time it was. Dark outside; no light but the moon.

Lucy whined. Lifted her head from the floor, looked around, those big black ears perked. She looked up at Jess and whined a little more.

Whatever it was, it had scared the dog, too.

"Never mind, you big baby. It's probably just a deer." Jess sat up, rubbed sleep from her eyes. Found the remote and turned down the TV. "For a big, scary guard dog, you're kind of a wuss."

Lucy grumbled like she wanted to contest the point, but decided better of it and laid her head back down. Kept her eyes fixed on the front door, though, and her ears at high alert.

Though Lucy might have looked the part, the truth was she wasn't really a guard dog. There wasn't much that Jess owned that needed guarding. "Companion animal," the VA doc had called her. "Something to help you keep your mind over here."

Lucy helped, sort of.

She was a mutt, probably pit bull but not entirely; she had that square, blocky head and that big, dumb pit smile when she panted, but her body was long and more lean than stocky. A boxer, maybe, or some kind of retriever. Her hair was short and fine, jet black save a white snout and a stripe up her forehead, a patch on her neck and one on her belly, white socks on all four paws, and another patch like paint on the tip of her tail. She was a rescue, the lady at the agency had told Jess, a refugee from somewhere back east, from some assholes who'd aimed to fight her.

The agency lady had sworn Lucy had never actually fought, the law having caught up to the assholes in question before they could actually chuck her into a pit. They hadn't even snubbed her tail or clipped her ears, and for that Jess was glad. Lucy's ears were her most distinctive feature: velvet smooth and floppy like a Labrador retriever's, they channeled the dog's mood better than her perpetually sad eyes or even her bullwhip tail.


Right now Lucy's ears were standing rigid. There was something outside. Jess could sense it out there, was 98 percent sure she wasn't stuck in her head again, hearing phantom Taliban creeping through her front yard. Lucy whimpered once more, stood up straighter, glanced over at Jess, and took a couple of tentative steps toward the front door, and Jess knew neither she nor the dog was imagining anything. Whatever was out there, it was real.

She pushed the blanket from her lap. Stood, the light from the TV casting a bluish glow around the small living room. She crossed the room to the window and peered out into the night, saw nothing but empty road and dark forest—and then she caught the glint of moonlight against American steel, thirty yards down the road and almost invisible.

Jess stepped back from the window. Felt her heart rate ramp up. Hers wasn't a road that saw much traffic, especially this time of night. It dead-ended about a quarter mile in the other direction, petered off into second-growth fir and cedar. Weren't many other houses, either, not close by. The road wasn't close to the highway, or even the water; unless you lived nearby, you wouldn't think to come this far down—and that truck outside didn't look like the neighbors'.

Damn it, Ty. Her husband had promised her a new house when she came home from her tour, something closer to town, something better than this: one bedroom, one bathroom, and a patch of grass in the backyard, which she'd fenced in so Lucy could do her business without Jess needing to worry she'd run off after a chipmunk and never come back.

Ty had been full of promises. A new house. A better truck. Hell, a family. Instead, Jess had come home a widow, come home to a load of debt and the same shack as ever, come home with not much more than bad memories and no clue what to do with herself next.

Excerpted from Deception Cove by Owen Laukkanen. Copyright © 2019 by Owen Laukkanen. Excerpted by permission of Mulholland. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.