Balance
Due

He came back for what he was owed.

One contract. Delivered as described. Balance unpaid.

At twenty to six on a wet November morning, on the beach below Hamburg's Blankenese, a man with no phone and no name worth knowing waits for a seventy-one-year-old shipbuilder and his black Labrador.

The job goes exactly to plan. Eight hundred thousand euros: half in advance, half on confirmation. The confirmation is in the newspapers by Thursday. The second half never comes.

Gerald doesn't take it personally. He takes it seriously. He pays what things are worth, and he expects to be paid the same way. So he comes back to the city where someone now has his photograph, to find out who decided not to pay and why.

His client has hired a private security firm to make sure he never finds out. On the other side, Detective Ole Jessen, a patient man after twenty-eight years on the force, is working the murder from the far end, one phone record at a time.

From a hotel fire stair in Hamburg to a thatched house at the edge of the North Sea, everyone is hunting someone. And the balance is still due.

A fast, cold, precise contract-killer thriller for readers of the Gray Man and Victor the Assassin.