Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"A gloriously good writer... Ranger Games is both surprising and moving...A memorable, novelistic account."-- Jennifer Senior, New York Times

Intricate, heartrending, and morally urgent, Ranger Games is a crime story like no other

Alex Blum was a good kid, a popular high school hockey star from a tight-knit Colorado family. He had one goal in life: endure a brutally difficult selection program, become a U.S. Army Ranger, and fight terrorists for his country. He poured everything into achieving his dream. In the first hours of his final leave before deployment to Iraq, Alex was supposed to fly home to see his family and beloved girlfriend. Instead, he got into his car with two fellow soldiers and two strangers, drove to a local bank in Tacoma, and committed armed robbery...
The question that haunted the entire Blum family was: Why? Why would he ruin his life in such a spectacularly foolish way?
At first, Alex insisted he thought the robbery was just another exercise in the famously daunting Ranger program. His attorney presented a case based on the theory that the Ranger indoctrination mirrored that of a cult.
In the midst of his own personal crisis, and in the hopes of helping both Alex and his splintering family cope, Ben Blum, Alex's first cousin, delved into these mysteries, growing closer to Alex in the process. As he probed further, Ben began to question not only Alex, but the influence of his superior, Luke Elliot Sommer, the man who planned the robbery. A charismatic combat veteran, Sommer's manipulative tendencies combined with a magnetic personality pulled Ben into a relationship that put his loyalties to the test.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue (p. 1)
• Book 1 The Golem of Tacoma
• Chapter 1 Sort of a Happy/Sad Deal (p. 7)
• Chapter 2 Basic (p. 34)
• Chapter 3 Amurican Bank Robber (p. 54)
• Chapter 4 One Fine Day at Battalion (p. 63)
• Chapter 5 Yes, Specialist Sommer (p. 74)
• Chapter 6 Those Who Are Versed in the Sciences (p. 90)
• Chapter 7 Something You Would See Out of a Movie (p. 103)
• Chapter 8 Federal Vacation (p. 111)
• Book 2 The Prodigy of Peachland
• Chapter 9 Soldier (p. 125)
• Chapter 10 Interrogation (p. 135)
• Chapter 11 Freedom Fighter (p. 143)
• Chapter 12 The Fourth Man (p. 153)
• Book 3 The Good Person
• Chapter 13 The B-Word (p. 171)
• Chapter 14 Just an Inexplicable Event (p. 189)
• Chapter 15 The Complexities (p. 201)
• Chapter 16 The Phabulous Phils (p. 218)
• Chapter 17 Getting Real (p. 228)
• Chapter 18 Real Real (p. 248)
• Book 4 The Dungeon Master
• Chapter 19 When Bad People Do Good Things (p. 259)
• Chapter 20 Space Station Sommer (p. 273)
• Chapter 21 Total Data (p. 290)
• Chapter 22 The Sommer Factor (p. 302)
• Chapter 23 Force of Personality (p. 316)
• Chapter 24 The Lady in the Striped Shirt (p. 322)
• Chapter 25 The P-Word (p. 334)
• Chapter 26 Probably Something I'll Never Understand (p. 356)
• Book 5 Freedom
• Chapter 27 Matrix of Lies (p. 367)
• Chapter 28 Birth of a Bank Robber (p. 384)
• Chapter 29 The Rest of Us (p. 393)
• Author's Note (p. 409)
• Acknowledgments (p. 411)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

PROLOGUE Most residents of Tacoma do not think of it as an army town. To visi­tors it presents as the scrappy kid sister city of Seattle, the coffee and arts mecca forty miles to the north with which it shares an airport. The notorious midcentury "Tacoma Aroma" from the paper mills has long since been filtered into submission. In its place are juice bars, outdoor supply stores, international film festivals. Every civic surface that hasn't been given over to kayaks and totem poles bristles with the spiky, membranous studio glasswork of homegrown sculptor Dale Chihuly. The only sign of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, whose more than 50,000 personnel make it Pierce County's largest employer by a factor of five, is the occasional Blackhawk helicopter beetling across the silhouette of Mount Rainier. In 2005, while Iraq spiraled into civil war and JBLM (then still divided into Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base) was dropping paratroopers over Afghanistan from its fleet of big-bellied C‑17 Globemaster IIIs, Tacoma's city coun­cil entertained a proposal for a 420-foot "Tower of Peace" to rival Seattle's iconic Space Needle. No one dared mention the base. "We want this to be really inclusive," the tower's leading champion told Tacoma's News Tribune . "Let a person form in their own mind what the concept of peace is."      Five miles down I‑5 toward the giant blank on the map where JBLM nestles into the strip malls of Lakewood, Parkland, and Span­away, a different America fades in, one that would be instantly familiar to residents of cities with less complicated relations to their servicepeople. Yoga bows down to CrossFit. Puffy North Face jackets disappear under Carhartt work coats and military surplus camo. All those boardroom-ready Dale Chihuly pieces give way to the very dif­ferent glasswork at Tacoma Pipe and Tobacco. The Patriots Landing retirement home advertises to military personnel: You served us. Now let us serve you!      Halfway down a block of auto dealerships and faded clapboard churches on South Tacoma Way stands a fieldstone-clad Bank of America that is popular with soldiers for its ease of access from I‑5. The facade is glassy and generic. A bed of purplish cinders houses a row of shrubs as boxy as green Legos. In back is a parking lot acces­sible from the alley, feeding to a bright red drive-through ATM. It is just a dreary little branch like any other, a squat corporate cipher in an unremarkable neighborhood close to base.      At 5:16 on the afternoon of August 7, 2006, three men ran out of its front door screaming that it was being robbed. Bank robberies come in two essential varieties. In a "nontake­over" robbery, the bandit--still the term used for bank robbers by the FBI, which publicizes monikers like "Snub-Nosed Bandit" and "Surfer Bandit" for as-yet-unidentified repeat offenders--slips a note to a teller explaining in brief that he intends the teller harm and desires cash. Nearby customers may not find out a robbery has occurred until after it is over.      The bank on South Tacoma Way, crowded with the after-work rush, was an example of the much rarer and more profound disrup­tion of a "takeover" robbery. In a matter of seconds the bank left its old function behind. Building security features designed to pro­tect the piles of $100, $50, and $20 bills from theft--thick con­crete walls, bulletproof Plexiglas, clear lines of sight throughout the lobby--were now tactical assets for entrenchment and defense. Tell­ers and managers who had previously spent their days in service to the smooth operation of the bank now found themselves conscripted into its defilement.      Meanwhile, outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, traffic contin­ued to trickle by in the sleepy August sun. Two customers in turn pulled up to the drive-through ATM, inserted their debit cards, engaged in small transactions, and drove away. Those who had fled the bank had already run down the block and crossed South 60th Street to reconvene in the front office of the Mallon Ford dealership, where employees were calling the police.      Two minutes later, long before the police arrived, a group of men in jeans, dark sweatshirts, and ski masks emerged from the alley that led to the bank's rear parking lot and started jogging down South 60th Street, in full view of the group at Mallon Ford. They carried a mix of AK‑47 assault rifles with wood stocks and banana clips, pistols, and duffel bags. One witness, who had happened past the bank as the robbery began and pulled her car over so her husband could run into the dealership and report what he'd seen, instinctively started driving after the gunmen, until two of them turned back and made eye contact with her through the holes in their masks. That was when she remembered that her kids were in the backseat.      Though it was not yet in evidence, there was, in fact, a getaway vehicle. A Mallon Ford employee by the name of Don Keegan had been unloading his company truck in the alley two minutes earlier when he noticed a silver Audi A4 turning into the continuation of the alley on the next block. Four men jumped out, pulled on ski masks, and ran toward the bank. The Audi backed out onto South 60th Street and stopped next to a sealed utility shed whose front door bore a warning about tampering with military communications systems. The license plate was unconcealed. In the driver's seat was a nineteen-year-old kid in a T‑shirt and sunglasses. Keegan got into his truck and drove around the block. On a residential street behind the bank, he happened to pass the same Audi going the other way. The four gunmen suddenly appeared from around the corner, spot­ted the Audi, and flagged it down as they jogged toward it. The kid in sunglasses stopped to pick them up.      That was my cousin Alex Blum. It is hard to convey the depth of the shock my family experienced on learning that Alex had robbed a bank. It hit us like news of alien life. Alex was the most squeaky-clean, patriotic, rule-respecting kid we knew. Four months earlier he had achieved the goal he had been striving toward since he was a boy, becoming an elite Special Operations commando in the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment's Second Battalion at Fort Lewis. In two weeks he was scheduled to deploy overseas to Baghdad, the fulfillment of his life's greatest ambition. Money had never interested him much. His father, my uncle Norm, a successful commercial real estate broker, had offered him $20,000 if he would delay enlisting in the army for a year. Alex politely declined.      The question that obsessed me for almost a decade after his arrest, the question that obsessed my family too, that obsessed even Alex himself, was simple: Why? At the time of the robbery I lived in Seattle, a few short miles from Fort Lewis. I had murky, conflicted feelings about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was hard to tell what I felt about Alex's fate other than a profound and untraceable wrongness. But the deeper I have dug into it over the years, the more it has cracked open everything I used to believe, like a fissure that turns out to go all the way to the heart of the world. Excerpted from Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime by Ben Blum All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In August 2006, four men robbed a bank in Tacoma of more than $50,000 in under three minutes, running out to a car where their driver waited. Two of these four and the driver were members of the 2nd Battalion/75th Ranger Regiment. The driver, Alex Blum, is the subject of this book and the first cousin of the author. Blum goes into great detail about his relatives, the army-more specifically, Ranger training-criminal psychology, and a host of other topics as he and his extended family try to come to grips with what his beloved cousin did. Johnathan McClain performs this long and detailed work, both the narrative and the extensive dialog and quotes, clearly. He is especially adept at dialog, being able to shift from subtly nuanced to loud and intense when needed. VERDICT Public libraries as well as those at military installations and those with criminal psychology and criminal justice programs should purchase. ["A detailed, sobering account of people doing what they believe is right in the face of injustice": LJ 8/17 review of the Doubleday hc.]-Michael T. Fein, Central Virginia Community Coll., Lynchburg © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Voice actor McClain briskly recounts the story of Alex Blum, a straight-arrow 19-year-old who joined the army out of high school and participated in an armed bank robbery with two fellow soldiers days before he was set deploy to Iraq. The book, written by his cousin Ben, attempts to unravel the confused and suspect motivations behind Blum's uncharacteristic actions, and the several conflicting explanations for his involvement in the crime proffered by his defense lawyers, Blum and his co-conspirators, and his family. Is he a victim of brainwashing? Did he really believe the heist was an organized army simulation? Was he just acting out? Narrator McClain does a terrific job of guiding listeners through this complex story as attitudes toward Alex shift. He vividly captures the book's watershed moment, Alex's appearance on the Dr. Phil show, nailing the emotional weight of the scene and the show host's folksy aphorisms. The book's narrative arc makes it well suited for the audio format, and McClain is more than competent. A Doubleday hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

This debut work is a stunningly well-executed examination of one man's abrupt fall into disgrace and another man's fascination with that fall. The men (one, a gung-ho U.S. Army Ranger on his way to Iraq in 2006; the other, the author of this book) grew up together as cousins in Colorado. The defining moment for author Blum's cousin Alex, and for this wrenching book, was Alex's sudden and seemingly inexplicable involvement in a bank robbery on the verge of his being shipped to Iraq, a moment that blew up his life and those of his relatives. Blum spent seven years puzzling out this act, interviewing Alex, family members, and friends. He also investigates the Ranger culture that instills blind obedience, and the evil influence that one special-operations commander held over Alex. The result is a well-researched, spellbinding work of narrative nonfiction that opens up the psychology of Ranger training, as well as giving the reader a compassionate view of the interlocking forces that can feed into one spectacularly bad decision.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2017 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A vigorous, empathetic chronicle of a crime foretoldor at least engendered, possibly, on a boot camp drill field.Though the mostly peace-minded citizens of Tacoma, Washington, may not know it, the military-industrial complex looms large there, with a joint Air Force and Army base constituting the area's largest employer by far. Blum tells the story of a group of four soldiers, including the author's cousin, Alex, who donned blue jeans and ski masks and tried to boost a bank. The news of the subsequent arrest shocked the respectable, intellectually competitive Blum family. "Alex was the most squeaky-clean, patriotic, rule-respecting kid we knew," writes the author, who digs into the case to tease out why an Army Ranger, part of a unit already under the spotlight for having tortured prisoners in Iraq, did something so transgressive. Among the theories the legal defense tested, he finds the notion that the heist was the result of a kind of brainwashing to be somewhat compelling, while the thought that the robbery was a training exercise isn't as absurd as it might appear on the face: "As far as Alex was concerned," one of his fellow soldiers says, "it wasn't real." In time, Blum looks closely at a charismatic leader who cooked up the scheme as an exercise in sociopathy and convinced his comrades to take part because it was cool and fun. "With him," writes the author, memorably, "you could become Donkey Kong or Cobra Commander or Wile E. Coyote, swallowing a pound of TNT and exploding and reconstituting again in time to pant so hard at a passing pretty girl that your tongue spilled out onto the floor." In the end, Blum writes, judge and jury did not accept any such Looney Tunes scenario, and how they arrived at their verdict affords the author some fine courtroom back and forth. A lighthearted romp la Ocean's Eleven it's not, but Blum's well-wrought account suggests that any crime is possible so long as it's made out to be a game. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.