Ahoy there me mateys!  This book has been on me list ever since it was featured by Matey Lynn @ lynn'sbookblog in the SPFBO #5 in 2019.  It is a military fantasy and the tagline caught me:

John Carver has three rules: Don’t drink in the daytime, don’t gamble when the luck has gone, and don’t talk to the dead people who come to visit.

This was a good read even though it ended up being very different from what I was expecting.  This of course was me fault for not rereading Lynn's review before picking up the book.  Because the dead people who come to visit are not ghosts but hallucinations from PTSD.  I had forgotten this.

The story follows two people, John Carver, who is the one suffering hallucinations and Mackenzie, a nurse in Afghanistan who is kidnapped.  I very much enjoyed both characters and the shifting POVs.  Carver was the more interesting perspective for me because of his "ghosts" and military background.  He is also snarky and quirky and I love those types of characters.

The book itself is action packed and I read it in one setting.  This book was a bit of a popcorn read for me.  The major problems were personal preferences.  A lot of the book deals with torture.  It is not gratuitous but I don't know if I would have picked it up had I known the extent of that plot line's focus.  My fault again for not rereading Lynn's review.  The other issue is that the bad guys are two-dimensional and the reasons for their evil were flat.  In addition the Big Bag does some magical things at the end that made no sense in the context of the set-up for how the magic works.

I would have preferred the plot to have stuck with Carver's story and dealing with being in Kabul and running an op.  I highly enjoyed the mission Carver was on, how he was dealing with Kabul, and the light details about the drug-lords.  I wish it would have continued in that vein and not switched topics and locations.  Despite the problems, this was an enjoyable book to pass some time on a lazy day.  Arrrr!