Balance Due

Some debts are settled. Others may be forgiven. The ones owed to the dead never close out

Tommy Dalton owns a café in a college town in western Massachusetts. He isn’t a cop. Or a retired special forces tough guy. None of this was ever his to carry.

Seven months ago his murdered father left him a cold wallet holding nearly half a billion dollars. Tommy gave it all away and told himself it was over.

Then Loretta Weston was dragged into a van outside a wedding, and the ransom came back as a number only a handful of people on earth could have known—the fee taken for making that fortune disappear. With her life on the line and the clock running out, Tommy went to Florida and floated a story to two very different men—a two-hundred-million-dollar swindle, a mystery woman—hoping whoever owned that money would surface to claim it. A desperate flare fired by an amateur into the night.

The clock stopped, but the flare is still burning.

Now he’s going back to put it out. Past the first set of gates, past the second, out to the private island where twenty families keep their fortunes and their secrets—chasing the woman his father tried to save, and a girl who vanished from a Palm Beach trailer park and returned with a new identity and a far better address.

The trail runs through a tiny fishing village outside Havana, a high-rise lobby in Jacksonville, and a lavish compound on Sanctuary Island. Tommy presses deeper into a world of wealth and power, where he finds both sinners and saints. What’s hiding in between is where the real evil lives.

He came to close a door. Something on the other side has been waiting for someone to open it.

Balance Due is the third Tommy Dalton mystery and the conclusion of the Cold Wallet saga—a character-driven crime thriller that keeps the violence off the page and the tension on it, with no explicit sex and no gratuitous gore. Just an ordinary man, in too deep, trying to get home to the people he loves.

If you’re drawn to the ordinary-man-in-over-his-head pull of Harlan Coben, the moral weight of Allen Eskens, or the twist-driven suspense of Robert Dugoni, Tommy Dalton is your kind of company.

Some debts are settled. Others may be forgiven. The ones owed to the dead never close out.