The Border's Quiet Rot

In the mist-shrouded frontier between the Republic of New Albion and the Dominion of Arcadia, Border Patrol Officer Leo Hardwick has spent eighteen years as a paragon of duty. When his wife's degenerative illness is met with a bureaucratic denial of her disability pension, Hardwick discovers that the greatest corruption is not the snarling evil of cartel kingpins, but the placid, self-justifying decay that comes from men who believe they are only taking what the world owes them. What begins as a small act of looking the other way for a single shipment of prescription painkillers spirals into a silent partnership with a ghost-like smuggling ring moving assault rifles and heroin. Hardwick never stops believing he is a good man, merely one who has learned to correct the system's failures, even as bodies begin to surface in the tamarack bogs. This is a psychological crime novel in the tradition of Peter Lovesey, where the most terrifying monster wears a pressed uniform and a calm smile.