It would be easy not to like LeAnne Hogan, the principal character in The Right Side (Atria Books, 2017), a marked departure from Spencer Quinn’s popular Chet and Bernie mysteries. The Army sergeant is recovering at Walter Reed Hospital after a disastrous mission in Afghanistan left her without her right eye and with her face and psyche badly scarred.

You want to thank LeAnne, for whom the Army has been her life, for her service. She would lash out at you for that. Various people offer kindness and assistance, and all she can think about is punching them out. Her only connection to a possibly humane world is her hospital roommate, Marci.

That’s when you realize — if, like me, you have no experience with military service, war, or the kind of injury and betrayal LeAnne has experienced — that you have no clue and just need to keep reading. Especially since you already know from the cover and description that there’s a dog in this story.

The dog doesn’t enter the picture until later, after Marci has suddenly died and LeAnne has made a cross-country drive, winding up in Marci’s home town in Washington state. As animals do, the big black canine turns up at a critical moment. Later named Goody, she annoys the hell out of LeAnne, but the two begin to find a way forward.

LeAnne tried running again. The dog helped, partly by pulling her along, but after what must have been a few hundred yards — meaning much farther than her first attempt — LeAnne began to suspect there was more than that to this little resurgence. Something the dog had deep inside was making its way down the leash and sharing itself with her. How was that possible? Did life run on some sort of magic rules that she’d missed the whole time? All LeAnne knew was that strength from the dog had passed into her own legs, and although she didn’t come close to running the way she used to run — and this performance wasn’t even respectable — she was doing better.

Turns out Goody was just getting started, and so was LeAnne.

It’s worth noting that Quinn, in the acknowledgments, thanks two Army veterans for reading and critiquing the manuscript for the novel. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but authenticity never hurt a good story.