Sign-In
Cart
The Albatross Ledger
Paperback
Publisher Price: $15.00
Publisher: Plan B Publishing Company
Published: Sep 1 2026
Pages: 228
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.52 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Santo Domingo, April 1965. Twenty-three thousand American troops land in the Dominican Republic to stop what Washington has decided is a second Cuba. The intervention will last seventeen months. The methods rehearsed there will travel forward to Saigon.
Dani Piedra is a CIA analyst whose ledger of suspected communists was meant to inform policy. In the hands of men with rifles, it becomes something else. Red Thibodeaux is a Military Police corporal at a checkpoint where the bodies arrive, and the paperwork does not. His logs go up the chain. They do not come back.
Neither is corrupt. Neither breaks the rules. The machinery around them works exactly as designed, and that is the problem.
Told across three acts, Careful Work, It's Not Enough, and Transferred, The Albatross Ledger traces how an institution credentials its own failures and carries the practice forward to the next war. It is a novel about intelligence, evidence, and the quiet bureaucratic distance between a name on a list and a body in a ditch.
Phillip Daigle served with the 82nd Airborne Division in the Dominican Republic in 1965. The Albatross Ledger is his fifth novel
For readers of Phil Klay's Missionaries and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke.
Santo Domingo, April 1965. Twenty-three thousand American troops land in the Dominican Republic to stop what Washington has decided is a second Cuba. The intervention will last seventeen months. The methods rehearsed there will travel forward to Saigon.
Dani Piedra is a CIA analyst whose ledger of suspected communists was meant to inform policy. In the hands of men with rifles, it becomes something else. Red Thibodeaux is a Military Police corporal at a checkpoint where the bodies arrive, and the paperwork does not. His logs go up the chain. They do not come back.
Neither is corrupt. Neither breaks the rules. The machinery around them works exactly as designed, and that is the problem.
Told across three acts-Careful Work, It's Not Enough, and Transferred-The Albatross Ledger traces how an institution credentials its own failures and carries the practice forward to the next war. It is a novel about intelligence, evidence, and the quiet bureaucratic distance between a name on a list and a body in a ditch.
Phillip Daigle served with the 82nd Airborne Division in the Dominican Republic in 1965. The Albatross Ledger is his fifth novel.
Also from
Daigle, Phillip
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paperback