Ranger Games

Ben Blum may have not known what he was getting into when, after his cousin Alec was arrested for an armed robbery in Tacoma on the eve of his first deployment as an Army Ranger to Iraq, he decided to put aside his computer science career and write about the crime. The result is a complex, searching, and disarmingly honest book—part memoir, part true crime, part sociological analysis of military culture and clinical psychopathy—that turns its conclusions inside-out more than once and makes you understand why that inexplicable crime might have been committed without ever claiming to fully explain it.