Two Pumps for the Body Man

Jeff Mutton walks the diplomatic beat protecting American officials in Saudi Arabia. An expert with guns, knives, grenades, and rockets, he’s survived assaults and sieges, stabbings and chokeholds, car bombs, carjackings, criminal hits, and countless other enemy threats. But instinct tells Mutton the menace he now faces dwarfs all these killers combined. The fool—his foot fetish has him in hot water again! Part soft-boiled noir, part literary satire, Two Pumps for the Body Man is an unserious look at a serious situation, a grim reminder that no matter how high the barricade, how sharp the razor wire, there is no front line to the War on Terror. And the enemy is everywhere, even within.

Author and diplomat B.A. East published his first novel, Two Pumps for the Body Man as a Bush-Cheney era black comedy. Set in Saudi Arabia, Two Pumps did for American diplomacy and the War on Terror what Catch-22 did for military logic in World War II: The enemy can't kill us if our institutions kill us first. His forthcoming novel, The Patchworks, examines American government and gun culture in a similar light. 
 
Originally from Connecticut, Foreign Service assignments have taken the author to Washington, Mexico, Ghana, Nicaragua, and Saudi Arabia, where he survived the December 2004 terrorist attack on our consulate in Jeddah. Prior to that he taught Literature and Composition at the American School of Asuncion in Paraguay; at BrooklynCollege Academy in New York; and as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi. Mr. East lives in northern Virginia with his wife and sons, working on adult fiction for juveniles and juvenile fiction for adults. He wards off evil with doses of black humor posted to his blog BenEastBooks.