THE PRICE OF A MAN

Journalist Cal Denning walked four days into the Colombian forest and photographed a mass grave: ninety-two farmworkers from one river village, dead at the edge of an illegal mine. The night he came out, he did the fair thing and called the mining company for comment. The next morning, on a red dirt road near the Venezuelan border, a guerrilla commander was waiting for him with two logs laid across the road.

The commander, Robles, was paid to be there. The man who paid him, Wade Carver, runs security for an American mining company, and an army colonel on Carver’s payroll wants the grave to stay buried. What they all want is the memory card Cal hid under the insole of his left boot.

Back home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, his sister Maggie Denning-Boyd is a court reporter who has spent her life taking down other people’s worst days word for word. Now the ransom calls come to her kitchen table every Tuesday night. To raise the money she sells her house and her husband’s shop. Then she packs her stenotype machine and goes up the river herself, to the village where nobody has ever asked the families what happened.

Chained to a tree beside a forgotten soldier nobody will pay for, Cal has to keep the pictures hidden through searches, bombings, and river crossings, while the army closes in with a rescue plan that would leave no one alive to testify. The price keeps changing. So does the question of who is doing the bargaining.

THE PRICE OF A MAN is a hostage thriller and a family story about a brother, a sister, and a boy who led a stranger to his own father’s grave — and about what a man is worth, and who gets to decide.