The Last Patrol

Sheriff Maxine “Max” Harper is going through the last of her father's storage boxes with her closest friends Chet, Zeb, and Hank, hoping for once to find nothing at all. Instead she finds a hidden folder tucked away from everything else, holding a photocopied patrol assignment sheet, part of an old map, and a column of handwritten numbers. The official record shows Frank Harper clearing duty on an ordinary night with nothing to report. His own field journal, kept faithfully for decades, shows something else entirely. The page for that same night left almost completely blank.

Frank Harper never left a page blank. Following the little he did write down, Max and her friends are led back into the Everglades toward a forgotten company work site known only by a number, Site Seventeen, where a worker disappeared years earlier under circumstances that were closed on paper long before they were ever truly understood. A small numbered tag, quietly kept rather than logged, is the first sign that Frank went further that night than any report ever admitted.

The deeper Max searches, the clearer it becomes that her father knew exactly what happened at Site Seventeen and chose, deliberately, never to write it down. An innocent man was left to carry blame he never deserved, a missing worker was never brought home to the family still waiting on him, and somewhere beneath the silence is the one thing Frank Harper, of all people, refused to put on the record.

With her mother Rose finally ready to talk about the husband behind the badge, Max has to decide how far to carry her father's last unfinished patrol, and whether the truth he spent years protecting still deserves protecting now that only she is left to make that call.

The Last Patrol is the fifth and final novel in Howard Mark Hines' Everglades Files series, bringing Frank Harper's own story full circle and handing his daughter the one route he never finished walking, along with the choice of what she does with everything he left behind.