Explora Books presented Michael D. Jacquard’s debut thriller, ‘Cold Ground: A Jack Decker Novel,’ at the 2026 Manila International Book Fair (MIBF), held September 9–13 at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 3rd Oct 2026 - MIBF, the Philippines’ longest-running and largest book fair, returned under the 2026 theme “Get Lit: Reading in a New Light,” with over 160 exhibitors across two floors of the SMX Convention Center. The fair’s official schedule listed over forty-nine special events and activities, including author signings, the School World segment for educators, and the Book Development Association of the Philippines’ Gintong Aklat Awards.
Jacquard’s novel echoes that theme by emphasizing seeing a familiar place—and the people within it—differently. Jack Decker, a retired US Army Special Forces and CIA Ground Branch operative, has spent fourteen months trying to settle into the quiet of the fictional town of Garrison Falls, Vermont. His new routine includes river walks with his rescued dog, Milo, renovating his house, and occasional stops at the local hardware store—the kind of small-town life where arriving without a past might have been possible. Milo’s discovery of a body along the Garrison River during a routine morning walk ends that quiet.
The case pulls Decker back into habits he moved to Vermont to leave behind—running plates without official authority, reading a room the way he once read a battlefield—and toward Cascade Supply Solutions, a newly arrived Delaware LLC operating out of a struggling mill town that appears, at first, to be an ordinary business. As the investigation widens, the question of who died on the riverbank becomes inseparable from a slower, quieter question Decker has spent a year avoiding: what happened to an intelligence asset named Farid, lost years earlier in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, and what responsibility Decker still carries for what happened.
Alongside the case, the novel tracks a smaller, more domestic kind of noticing—a wary relationship with the hardware-store owner, who distrusts the town’s new arrivals; a fly-fishing lesson Decker offers to a neighbor; and the accumulated routines of mornings Decker once distrusted precisely because he valued them. The same attention that lets him take a town apart also, gradually, lets him stay in one.
The author’s note places the fictional town against a real landscape: Garrison Falls does not exist, but the strain visible in Vermont mill towns and the shell companies that move into the vacancies left behind are, in Jacquard’s words, “real in the ways that matter.”
MIBF 2026 marked the novel’s first presentation at an international book fair. Cold Ground: A Jack Decker Novel is available through Amazon and other major online bookstores.
About Explora Books
Explora Books is a book marketing firm located in the heart of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The company specializes in self-publishing and marketing, taking pride in its exhaustive research and creative strategies that provide wider avenues for aspiring authors to gain recognition for their works. Explora Books aims to guide authors through the complexities of self-publishing, offering convenient solutions to navigate this process. The firm fosters and redefines creativity and innovation, setting new industry standards. Explora Books is dedicated to empowering authors globally.
Organization: Explora Books Ltd
Contact Person: Simon Pratt
Website: https://explorabooks.com/home
Email: Send Email
Contact Number: +16043306795
Address: Jameson Offices, 838 W Hastings St w, Vancouver, BC V6C 0A6, Canada
City: Vancouver
State: British Columbia
Country: Canada
Release id: 49636
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