The Necessary Men

Available for pre-order; publishes September 26, 2026

Mike Holman and Pierce Polk aren't invading Cuba — they're making its government irrelevant, one power grid and garbage crew at a time. The world gets a front-row seat to a revolution nobody's supposed to notice happening.

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The fourth entry in Scott McKay's bitingly satirical Mike Holman series takes its hero somewhere the headlines haven't caught up to yet: Cuba, where a regime that can't keep the lights on for three hours a day is finally running out of road.

Pierce Polk isn't sending in the Marines. He's sending in garbage trucks, port cranes, and a floating power plant — and letting a dying government discover that nobody needs it anymore. Undercover as a Canadian project manager in a sleepy coastal town, Mike Holman watches, and helps write, the quiet dismantling of a dictatorship from the inside, one job at a time.

But nothing this audacious stays contained. A Washington congresswoman with a grudge and a subpoena. A Cuban colonel who believes he's being groomed to rule. A double game with Beijing that PJ's own estranged father doesn't know he's playing. A shipment of leftist American college activists who signed up for "revolutionary work brigades" and end up qualified forklift operators instead. And a hurricane bearing down on a plan five months in the making.

The Necessary Men asks the question its title can't quite answer: are the people willing to risk everything to build something better fools — or are they exactly what stands between the world and the monsters waiting to take what's left? Mike and PJ don't just argue that question. They live it, and it costs them.

Sharp, satirical, and grounded in real geopolitics, The Necessary Men is the most ambitious entry yet in a series readers have called "chillingly possible."

More from the Mike Holman series: See all four books