From the award-winning author of The Gone-Away World and
Angelmaker--a novel at once heartfelt and thrilling about parenthood,
friendship and secret identities, about heroes of both the super and the
everyday kind.
"An irresistible delight, something like Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
as played by James Bond." --The Washington Post
Sergeant Lester Ferris is a good man in need of a rest. After a long
career of being shot at, he's about to retire. The mildly larcenous,
backwater island of Mancreu, a former British colony in legal limbo,
belching toxic clouds of waste and facing imminent destruction by an
international community afraid for their own safety, is the ideal place
to serve out his time. There is an illicit Black Fleet lurking in the
bay: spy stations, arms dealers, offshore hospitals, drug factories and
torture centers. Lester's brief, however, is to sit tight and turn a
blind eye, so he drinks tea and befriends a brilliant, Internet-addled
street kid with a comic-book fixation. When Mancreu's fragile society
erupts in violence, Lester must be more than just an observer: he has no
choice but to rediscover the man of action he once was, and find out
what kind of hero the island--and the boy--will need.
