The Night Watch at Balboa

About this book:

In the sweltering night of the Panama Canal Zone, 1946, the war is officially over—but at Balboa Naval Hospital, the casualties are still arriving. Lieutenant Eleanor Vance runs the graveyard shift where troop ships offload their broken cargo: men ravaged by malaria, tuberculosis, and the hollow silence of combat fatigue. Between the jungle humidity and the bureaucratic machinery grinding them toward discharge papers, Eleanor and her battle-scarred corpsman, Joe Miller, navigate a ward where the line between healing and processing is measured in quinine doses and morphine syrettes.

When a midnight transport delivers eight silent men who don't speak, don't smoke, and don't seem to breathe like the living, the routine of the night watch fractures. Something moved in the holds of the *General William Weigel* that no manifest explains, and the Canal Zone—ten miles wide, dripping with secrets, caught between two oceans—has never been good at keeping what passes through it buried.

Atmospheric, unsentimental, and razor-sharp, *The Night Watch at Balboa* is a masterwork of historical noir that renders the invisible wounds of war in prose that cuts like a scalpel. For readers of *The English Patient* and *The Things They Carried*, this is the story of the way station where victory rots, and the night shift bears witness.