The Hot Country

Description

Christopher Marlowe Cobb ('Kit'), the swashbuckling American newspaper war correspondent travels to Mexico in 1914, during that country's civil war, and the controversial presidency of Victoriano Huerta, El Chacal (The Jackal). Covering the war in enemy territory and in the sweltering heat, Cobb falls in love with Luisa, a young Mexican laundress, who is not as innocent as she seems. One day Kit witnesses a priest being shot, but the bullet ricochets off the cross he wears around his neck and leaves him unharmed. Cobb sets out to investigate the sniper.

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and sixteen other novels including Hell, A Small Hotel, Perfume River, and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

The Hot Country draws on many elements of the traditional adventure yarn, including disguises, fist fights and foot races, double agents and alluring young women who may be honey traps or spies... though in prose that has been written with serious attention... this first report makes you want to read on into the war correspondent's second edition -- Mark Lawson * Guardian * Lately, I find myself drawn to literary thrillers: stories powered by a full-throttle narrative, driven by sharply drawn characters whose every turn has been carefully plotted -- Steven Jay Griffel * Thirsty * combines a fast-moving plot with characters of a complexity that is not always found in such fiction -- Nick Rennison * Sunday Times * a genuine and exhilarating success -- Russel D. McLean * Times Literary Supplement * Exciting story... The Hot Country is a thinking person's thriller, the kind of exotic adventure that, in better days, would have been filmed by Sam Peckinpah -- Patrick Anderson * Washington Post *