A Guilty Mann
A man who hates the world must try to save it.
Horace "Horse" Mann and Pitt Watters are bros. Jaded long-time expats
in Lima, Peru, they drink together, snort coke together, go surfing
together.
And spy together.
Horse knew his friend was a lithium mining engineer in the Bolivian
altiplano. He'd blow into town looking to let off steam after a two-week
shift. Over beers and girls he'd explain how lithium-ion batteries would
end the need for fossil fuels.
Turns out there's a lot Horse didn't know about his friend.
When Pitt goes missing, Horse's efforts to find him hit a snag. He comes
home to find Pitt's mother -- the American ambassador's wife -- strangled
in his apartment. Arrested and charged with murder, and denied consular
aid, Horse escapes Lima and follows his only lead to a Buddhist ashram
on the shores of Lake Titicaca.
Horse's journey from the underbelly of Lima to the Bolivian salt flats
uncovers a conspiracy involving the CIA, the Chinese secret service, and
a group of Gaia-worshiping environmental terrorists.
And when he finally finds Pitt, he must choose between saving his soul
and saving the world.
Complete at 76,500 words, A GUILTY MANN is a hard-boiled thriller
set in South America, with an environmental twist.
The Judas Syndrome
Sometimes only in betrayal is love even possible.
Joshua McAdams knows how to hate, especially authority. So when he
graduates from Stanford and joins an anti-American guerrilla insurgency
in Colombia, he must learn how to love, or lose everything.
Present day: the Drug War has failed. Two Stanford students on vacation
in Colombia are kidnapped by a new guerrilla group fighting to legalize
cocaine production. When it turns out their leader is Joshua's old
mentor from Stanford, he decides to join the guerrillas. Together they
recruit and train other backpackers to carry out a series of bombings in
Bogotá. Success is within reach -- the president of Venezuela threatens
to invade if the group's demands are not met -- but there is a spy in
their midst. Captured by American commandos, Joshua tells the
interrogators his story. He is forced to confront the truth of what he's
done, and in recognizing his own betrayal, finally learns, too late, to
love.
Complete at 85,000 words, THE JUDAS SYNDROME is a character-driven
political/espionage thriller. It's about Colombia in the same way
THE QUIET AMERICAN is about Vietnam or THE MISSION SONG is about
the Eastern Congo.
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