Part of the NATO forces dispatched to fight the Taliban, the Third Platoon has arrived in desert hell. Among them: the commander whose negotiations outweigh scruples; a naive videographer planning to create a monument to the war on the web; a medic unprepared for what a roadside bomb can do to human flesh; the lone woman in the troop burying the trauma of childhood neglect to face horrors she thinks she can finally control; and Schroder, the platoon leader. A former designer of computer games, he’s the natural choice for moving his players through the coming chaos.

But when the mission begins to exact an incalculable toll on the sanity and humanity of the Third Platoon, identifying the real enemy becomes dire. Following a devastating betrayal, they are driven by vengeance to a destiny more savagely violent than they were trained for.

An explicitly brutal portrait of battle told with the propulsion of a harrowing psychological thriller, The First Stone puts readers in the crosshairs between the madness of the imagination and the bestial realities of a conflict without end.