The Right Side - Spencer Quinn

LeAnne is in the hospital recovering from losing an eye to a grenade while serving overseas. Her roommate Marci dies abruptly, and LeAnne decides it's time to leave. After a brief, difficult return to where she grew up, she heads north, to where Marci lived. A dog finds her there and decides it'll be staying with her, whether she likes it or not. Then it turns out Marci's daughter has gone missing.
This isn't really a mystery novel. LeAnne does spend some time asking questions and searching, but it rarely feels like the fate of the child is the primary issue. It's more this is something LeAnne's doing to either get back a sense of who she is, or that she's using to avoid thinking about her situation.

The book is 60% done before LeAnne learns Marci's daughter is missing. That works, because it gives time to see how LeAnne's dealing with her injury, and with everyone around her. The loss of depth perception gets brought up a couple of times, the way people react when they see the scarring much more frequently, as well as the different approaches LeAnne takes in either concealing it or not. But the main thing I noticed was how disoriented she seems to be. There are conversations she had or people she met before the book begins she doesn't recall. She can't keep track of time. That might be general indifference, but it feels more significant considering another part of her injury that she only occasionally remembers. She's very on edge. Almost any question towards her or response to something she says can set her off. Hardly any conversations in the first 200 pages end pleasantly. It reached the point any time someone would approach her I would internally flinch expecting ugliness. I figured sooner or later it would escalate and she isn't in top form.

There are a lot of flashbacks to her time in Afghanistan, building to how she got injured, and questions about what actually happened. You can figure out pretty easily before the answer arrives, but again, I think it's more about LeAnne's state of mind. Although I wasn't clear if the flashbacks were something LeAnne was experiencing, when she was asleep perhaps, or for us only. I thought it was the former initially, which was interesting given her recall of recent events was so poor, but she remembered all these older things so clearly. Then there was some internal narration on her part that suggested her memory of those older events is pretty shaky too, so I'm not sure. Mostly though, it's that she doesn't want to deal with it, look back at it, which seems understandable. There's nothing she can do about how it turned out now.

'LeAnne hit the road. Her expectation was that after a day of practice, she'd be more like her old motoring self, back in the passing lane. The truth was she'd gotten worse. Everybody - even the old and the timid - was now going too fast. It wasn't just on account of her eye straining to carry the whole load by itself. Her brain, too, was part of the problem, so slow to process all the movement around her. And that stuck metal lid thing going on behind her. . . what would you call it? Crater? Yes, exactly, like a bomb crater. Where had she been headed with this? She'd lost the thread.'