COLD WARRIOR

Ethan Walsh is nineteen, back in his mother's house in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and out of second chances. To get back into school he needs a hundred and twenty hours of service at Longleaf Pointe, a senior living facility in the shadow of Fort Bragg. His first problem is small. Somebody is stealing the game pieces.

The thief is Jack Morgan. Ninety-six years old. On oxygen. Half his face rebuilt. He's using the Scrabble tiles and the Risk armies to rebuild his old operations on a folding table: a recon team in Laos with the dogs closing in, a Soviet tank coming out of the fog at Lang Vei, a rooftop in Tripoli, a bell tower in the Bosnian snow.

Jack tells it like a paperback. Every story has a Russian with pale eyes, a woman code-named Sparrow, and a skinny kid from Detroit named Johnny Martin who always walked point.

So Ethan checks the record. Some of it holds. Some of it is in a paperback series from the 1970s, with Jack's name on every cover. And one mission, the last one, Jack won't tell at all.

As the old man's memory slips and a stolen-valor hunter comes for him with a camera, Ethan has one summer to find out what happened to Johnny Martin, and to decide whether you can love someone whose story you can't prove.

Cold Warrior is a war novel told in two voices: a nineteen-year-old checking every fact, and a ninety-six-year-old telling it the way it should have happened. It moves from Vietnam to Libya, Beirut, Berlin and Bosnia, through the secret history of the Cold War, and ends at a hospital tray table in room 214.

Companion pieces: the Shining Brass game zine and a 3D-printable Jack Morgan statue. Art in this book is painted in the style of 1970s men's adventure paperbacks.