A handler goes silent. An ebony knight appears on the porch. And Huck Rogers is back in the work he thought he'd left behind.
Three weeks of quiet on White Beach. Helicopter charters for drunk Korean tourists, German couples chasing dolphins, the same San Miguel at Eddie's bar at the end of the strip. Then a small brown box turns up on Huck's porch in the dark, and inside it is a hand-carved chess piece - pre-war ebony, no note, no card, no signature. By breakfast, Pardun has missed his third check-in. By nightfall, his weather number is dead. By morning, Coop is on a plane out of Bangkok and Diona is packing a bag in Bohol that she had, somehow, already half-packed.
Somewhere on the coast of Batangas, in a walled estate with a private airstrip and a courtyard tiled in black and white, an old Spanish-trained operator named Hernan is playing one move a day across a chessboard with the man he intends, when the game ends, to begin to break. He has been at this work for forty years. He has never failed to finish what he started. But he has never had this prisoner before, and the prisoner has been preparing a move of his own.
To get Pardun out, the crew has to assemble fast and move quiet - through the bougainvillea lanes of a Batangas town, past an orchid grower with grandchildren in school, into a house where every afternoon at three-forty a stair sounds and a bolt turns. What they don't know yet is that the woman pulling Hernan's strings has already begun closing her doors. And one of them has already paid for entry.
THE BATANGAS SILENCE is the sixth Huck Rogers adventure, a tightly-built rescue thriller set across Mindoro, Manila, Cebu, and the green coast of Batangas. Spare prose. Long silences. A chess game, a bolt-action Garand, a Bell 407, and a porch on White Beach where the coffee is bad on purpose.
Perfect for readers of:
- Don Winslow, Lawrence Block, and Robert B. Parker
- Slow-burn Southeast Asia thrillers and ex-pat noir
- Cormac McCarthy's quieter registers and Hemingway's cleaner ones
- Series fiction with a returning crew and rising stakes
The Huck Rogers Adventure Series: Six books. One pilot. The whole archipelago between him and the people who keep finding him.
Standalone read - but if you've followed Huck from Mindanao to Hoi An to Bohol, this is the one where the bill comes due.
