"An off-book CIA operative with an IQ of 158 hunts a conspiracy that reaches from Atlanta's criminal underworld to the highest levels of U.S. intelligence — and straight to the friend he trusts most."
By Paul Lanigan | Espionage Thriller | Book completed — available for purchase shortly
Billy Michaels has an IQ of 158, a HALO jump certification, and a classified file that three congressional oversight committees believe doesn't exist. He isn't employed by the CIA — he's funded by it, off the books, through Project Tin.
Crane, who hunts with a recurve bow and never misses. Rivera, who reads a room like a surgeon reads an X-ray. Donovan, who defuses anything — devices, situations, people. Mary Spade, who finds the signal in noise entire agencies call clean. Together: Meridian Risk Solutions, Atlanta.
A burning facility on Sea Island. A mine shaft in the Chattahoochee National Forest. A medical examiner's report someone arranged. The trail leads to two names — Val and Hilly — and to a traitor who has been close to Billy from the very first drink.
"The shadows don't disappear. They move."
"I have a rule about carrying guilt. You lock it in a box, you bury the box, and you walk away. You don't mark the grave. The problem with that system is that guilt is not the only thing you bury — and the other things have a habit of digging themselves out."
"He's still breathing." — three words, handwritten, that change everything
"One of the people who had been keeping those shadows informed was someone I had bought rounds for at the Mitre and considered, without reservation, a friend. He had been doing it from the beginning. He had been doing it from the very first drink."
A Shadow of Tin is a complete, standalone espionage thriller of roughly 75,000 words — and the opening movement of an open-ended series with serious film and television potential.
From a dive bar off Ponce de Leon to the boardrooms of Buckhead, the novel is soaked in a specific, lived-in version of Atlanta — and runs from the mountains of North Georgia to a military island in the South Atlantic and the chambers of a Senate oversight committee that officially knows nothing about Billy Michaels.
Billy Michaels isn't a superhero — he's an anomaly: a kid from Macon, Georgia with an IQ of 158 who became a HALO-certified off-book operative, and who is just as haunted by what the work has cost the people he loves as he is good at the work itself.
The reader is told from page one that someone close to Billy has been working against the team since the very first drink. Watching him not see it — and start to — is the engine of the whole book.
A Shadow of Tin is only the beginning. The Billy Michaels trilogy continues with A Network of Shadows and concludes with A Reckoning of Shadows.
The conspiracy is named. The team is formed. The traitor is already inside. Read the sample chapters and get the book.
"The gap was real. It had not been closed. It had been partially mapped." Six weeks after the mine shaft, Project Tin discovers the gap is bigger than the operation built to close it.
"Two men. One reckoning. The gap doesn't close itself." The trilogy's culmination — Billy Michaels versus Mick Harding, and thirty years of shadows finally brought into the light.
Get a real taste of A Shadow of Tin: the prologue, "The Dead Don't Stay Buried," plus Chapters One through Three — Billy's origins, his eleven field operations, and the introduction of his handler, the Sparrow.
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