The Officers' Club — Ralph Peters

Spring, 1981. Vietnam is over, but the repercussions linger. The military strives to recover as society reels from the excesses of the 1970s...

A sinister beauty and a dutiful soldier... a Hollywood lawyer running from a dirty past and a cast-off vet who seems to have no future... dueling drug gangs along the Mexican border... and the mutilated remains of a female lieutenant.

Stunning, promiscuous, and brilliant at spotting the weaknesses in others, Jessie Lamoureaux may have been killed by a jealous lover, a drug smuggler -- or a ghost from a life she hoped she had left behind.

Was her murderer the Green Beret she betrayed? The captain whose marriage she shattered? The senior officer hoping to save her from herself? A female sergeant fighting for dignity in a man's world? Or a fellow lieutenant with a secret of his own?

In this gritty tale of young men and women torn between the laws of the land and the laws of the heart, a dark journey leads from a moonlit beach in Mexico to mayhem in Iran -- then back to a country looking for its soul.

The Officers' Club captures the passions and confusion of the times, the reckoning due after a decade of indulgence -- and the commitment of those who stayed in uniform through the bad years.

As the military and society struggle to right themselves, their conflicts are embodied in the question:

Who killed Lieutenant Jessie Lamoureux?