The Hot Country: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller

Butler, Robert Olen

ISBN 10: 1611749573 ISBN 13: 9781611749571

Publisher: HighBridge Audio, 2012

Synopsis

Christopher Marlowe Cobb (“Kit”), the swashbuckling early 20th-century American newspaper war correspondent, travels to Mexico in April and May of 1914, during that country’s civil war and the American invasion of Vera Cruz.   But covering the war in enemy territory and in sweltering heat isn’t enough of a challenge for Cobb. Soon, he’s falling in love with a young Mexican laundress, Luisa, who may not be as innocent as she seems, and he’s witnessing the inexplicable attempted sniper assassination of a priest (miraculously, the bullet rebounds off the cross around his neck, leaving him unharmed). Now Cobb is also trying to track down a sniper—and figure out why important German officials are coming into the city in the middle of the night from ammunition ships docked in the port.   An exciting tale of intrigue and espionage, Butler’s powerful crime-fiction debut is a thriller not to be missed.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seventeen novels, including Hell, A Small Hotel, Perfume River, and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Butler takes his first crack at crime fiction with this stylish historical thriller set in civil war–torn Mexico in 1914. Christopher Marlowe Cobb (call him “Kit”) is a newspaper war correspondent in search of action, so naturally he winds up in Vera Cruz just as the American navy is staging a very peculiar mini-invasion. Kit would like to get to the bottom of that, and he would also like to score an interview with Pancho Villa. Then there’s the matter of the Mexican woman who may be a laundress but may also be something very different—and with whom Kit has very definitely fallen in love. And let’s not forget the German entourage: What are they doing in Vera Cruz? Along the way to answering all those questions, Kit gets more directly involved in the fighting than he’d planned. (And so do we: Butler’s multipage, one-sentence description of a gun battle between Villa’s troops and the Federales is a virtuoso feat of breathless, high-energy descriptive prose.) The plot of this multistranded thriller is at times difficult to follow, but the character studies, sense of place, and mood are utterly gripping. The hard-bitten war correspondent is a staple of the thriller genre, of course, but Butler brings new depth and flair to the familiar figure; only Fowler in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1956) or perhaps Russell Cruz-Price, Kent Harrington’s dissolute journalist in Red Jungle (2005), comes close to Kit Marlowe for that irresistible mix of been-there-twice-seen-this-shit-before cynicism and its polar opposite, an unquenchable desire to see if the next card turned just might be something special. Reviewers feel that way, too, sometimes, but the card this book turns is definitely something special. --Bill Ott

About this edition

• Publisher: HighBridge Audio
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1611749573
• ISBN 13: 9781611749571
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 645