Lieutenant Jeff Coburn walked away from the law after watching a judge railroad his father. He joined the Navy instead and took a Pentagon tour after a grueling deployment. It was supposed to be an easy year of paperwork and staff meetings.
Then his uncle Paul dies alone in his West Virginia cabin and the police rule it a suicide.
But Jeff knows the ruling is wrong. Paul was left-handed and the weapon lies on his right. There is a water ring on a table Paul built with his own hands, a table he would never have let a glass touch. Out in the treeline, in a hollow with a sightline to the house, sits a lighter that couldn't have been uncle Paul's.
The Marine Corps sends Paul's file: Five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. A dishonorable discharge for desertion waiting for him when he got home. And page after page struck through in black.
What the censors left behind is a trail planted by a man who understood exactly what he was up against. Jeff follows it back into the mountains his family has been surviving for generations, uncovering contract fraud that has been draining the Navy since Vietnam and revealing the people who took Paul Coburn's honor.
Drawing on a career spent inside the institutions his fiction examines, TJ Stecker delivers a thriller about the cost of a lie that won't stay buried.
