THE HOT COUNTRY

An exciting tale of intrigue and espionage, set in Mexico's civil war in 1914.

Pulitzer Prize—winner Butlers ambitious first crime novel introduces Christopher Marlowe ~Kit Cobb, an American war correspondent who has come to Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1914 to cover the country‘s civil war. A passionate believer in the power of a tree press and the moral superiority of the United States, Kit is no mere observer. He assumes a false identity to pursue German diplomat Friedrich von Mensinger en route to a meeting with revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, and the correspondent soon finds himseif up to his neck in political intrigue. The large cast includes laundress Luisa Morales, a pretty senorita with whom Kit becomes romantically involved; Gerhard Vogel, an American-born German soldier; and a resourceful pickpocket, Diego, who acts as Kit‘s eyes and ears.

THE HOT COUNTRY (reads as II it were written as a lark — and maybe it was. This high-spirited adventure by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler is an antic concoction of genre cliches, literary sendups, personal homages, fanciful history and passages of great writing. Its narrator, Kit Cobb, is a correspondent cover ing the Mexican clvil war for a Chicago newspaper. He‘s more dashing than Richard Harding Davis, who wears evening ciothes to dinner, and more rugged than Jack London, who lands in Vera Cruz “looking as if he‘d hopped a freight from the Klondike.“ Soon Kit learns that a German ship transporting 15 million rounds of ammunition is lurking oft the coast. But enough plot. The fun lies in coming accross Hemingwayesque passages like the duel Kit fights, wielding only a typewriter, with a German officer: “His sword was out and angling back and he was committed to a thrust and he did not imagine anything could intervene and the Corona was heavy, very heavy, siower than I expected, and I strained hard and...“ And I laughed out loud.

A fine stylist, Butler (A Small Hotel) renders the time and place in perfect detail, though readers should be prepared tor a sluggish plot that lingers over the minutiae of the political machinations.