My kind of book. A real page turner. I was sorry when I read the last page. Will definitely lookout for this author in future.

An interesting war story focusing on an American POW in Iraq and her Mujaheddin captors. The book provides some interesting insights into the methods, philosophies and differences of opinion amongst jihadists but ultimately it didn't grip me quite as much as I wanted it to.

One thing abundantly clear is that Van Reet knows what he's talking about when he writes war: he conveys the chaos, the confusion and the visceral nature of combat with a raw and clear-eyed intention. We hear the noise, we see the blood, we smell the fear and the fire.

That said, there are signs of less than complete mastery over the craft of novel-writing: for one, there are two many switches in points of view (two 1st person narrators, plus a 3rd person narrative focalised through a female soldier) and that constant flitting backwards and forwards in time and geography that so many authors do without necessarily considering what it adds to the story they're telling. Rather than creating tension or roundedness, this served to distract and irritate me - the second 1st person narrative by a tank soldier, especially, seems to add little other than a bit of handy moralising about the lacks of morals in a war setting.

What attracted me to this book was the blurb about the captured female soldier and Van Reet treats this strand superbly: again, it's a shame that we're halfway through the book before this advertised storyline emerges. When it does, the closely-wrought tension, the twisted intimacy between captors and captives, ramp the book up and these sections alone (in between all the to-ing and fro-ing to other people and places) would have warranted a 5-star rating. Especially impressive, is the way Van Reet gets inside a female consciousness, something that not all male authors do with success.

So a somewhat mixed response fom me though one which is certainly positive: the claustrophobic and sometimes shocking events during the captivity scenes are what made this a standout read for me - more focus, less generalising 'war is chaos' (I'm sure it is but too many other books are saying the same thing) would have upped my rating: 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 because the taut captivity scenes are rendered superbly.

To be posted on Goodreads and Amazon

In Spoils, Brian Van Reet returns to the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By following the lives of two US soldiers and one of the mujahideen, he creates a visceral but nuanced exploration of that conflict.

The book opens with a firefight at a road crossing outside an Iraqi village which the American troops have nicknamed Triangletown. Specialist Cassandra Wigheard, a female gunner is wounded and captured by the mujahideen. Van Reet then flicks back in time to explore how she and the mujahideen arrived at that point, including the view of a second soldier, Sleed, who fails to support Cassandra’s platoon as he was too busy looting an Iraqi palace.

About half way through, van Reet returns to this present and the plight of Cassandra and her two crew mates captured by the mujahideen cell and occasionally on the army’s hunt for them. Inside the mujahideen cell itself there is dissention around what to do with the prisoners, their new leader seeing lots of opportunity of propaganda.

This is a small story in the context of the broader war. The initial conflict is a small roadside firefight and the characters are a long way down the chain of command. But by focussing in on what are essentially minor players, Van Reet shines a light on the conflict as a whole. Both on the justification and mindset of the combatants and that of people they were fighting, in particular the foreign fighters who saw a chance to give America a black eye and galvanise broader support.

Van Reet’s description of the soldiers and their mindset feels authentic. This is probably not surprising as he spent time in the US army in a tank division during this conflict. But being there is not enough. Van Reet is able to effectively convey the sights and sounds and feelings of being in one of those platoons. His soldiers feel real as does the conflict itself. Van Reet stays completely away from a black and white view of either side, depicting a moral grey zone in which small decisions are informed by a wider context or belief system.

There have been many great books about war, Spoils has the potential to become one of them.