Marlowe thinks he's found his first big headline in the attempted assassination of a priest-the bullet miraculously rebounding off the holy man's cross. Employing a young pickpocket to help him uncover the identity of the sniper, Cobb is soon led into a far more dangerous story: the advancement of German officials coming into the city from ammunition ships docked in the port. Then, when Cobb falls for a young Mexican laundress, he believes he's found a soft respite from hard news. If only she were as innocent as she seems.
"This high-spirited adventure by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler is an antic concoction of genre clichés, literary sendups, personal homages, fanciful history and passages of great writing."
New York Times Book Review
"It's an exciting story, much of it based on fact, and Butler has a good time with it. His writing is both crisp and thoughtful, his people ring true and he offers an amusing portrait of a golden age in journalism. . . . 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."
Washington Post
"Butler takes an often-overlooked chapter of history and turns it into a whip-smart tale of intrigue and espionage."
