True Bearing

Major Peter Hargrove is the frontrunner for governor of Florida — a decorated combat veteran whose campaign runs on the one thing no consultant can manufacture: the trust of people who've seen him carry weight before. Then a grainy photograph from Kandahar surfaces, and Peter starts losing four seconds at a time to heat, diesel, and a scream he can't place. The eleven days missing from his service record were never a medical accident. They were erased — deliberately, expertly, by people he trusted with his career and his life. As a reporter, a forensic accountant, and a dead Afghan intelligence officer's name pull the thread further, Peter has to decide how much of the truth he can survive knowing, and how much of his own campaign was built on money that should never have crossed an ocean. True Bearing is a political thriller about memory, complicity, and the difference between the man a campaign sells and the one who has to live with what he did — and didn't do — to become him.