W.E.B Griffin

Still in Argentina tying up loose ends from his investigation into the UN oil-for-food scandal, Charley Castillo is startled when a young man is marched into his office at gunpoint, caught trying to sneak through the fence. It turns out he's an American officer, a lieutenant assigned to the embassy in Paraguay. A key agent for the DEA has disappeared while trying to interdict drugs and very little is being done about it, for phony diplomatic reasons....

Homicide Sergeant Matthew Payne is used to murder, but lately there's been an awful lot of it in Philadelphia. A gangland shooting in a popular tourist location left six dead, most of them bystanders, and days later the headless body of a Latina turns up in the Schuylkill River. Everybody assumes that they're not related, but Payne can't shake the hunch that there's something more to it - and that hunch leads him to the Texas-Mexico border.