Author details from amazon.co.uk:
"Stuart Archer Cohen is in his early 40s. He owns an international company trading in rare textiles, and lived in China and South America before settling in Alaska where he now lives with his wife and two children. He has travelled widely and speaks English, Spanish and Mandarin fluently. His acclaimed first novel, INVISIBLE WORLD, was set in Inner Mongolia."
Summary from amazon.co.uk: "The assignment depressed him. He knew that the Waterbury investigation would be a sham, that it was political and that the Chief was in on it. He knew that the reason he'd been appointed to head up the investigation was for the express purpose of not finding the killer. He knew that clearly, because he was the one who had put the bullet in the back of Waterbury's head. Comisario Miguel Fortunato has been in the Buenos Aires police for a long time. Perhaps too long. His pockets have seen more than half a million dollars in bribes over the years. But that's just the way it is. He hasn't done as much wrong as some of his colleagues, but he never managed to tell his wife - just dead from cancer - where most of their money was coming from. Now he has a delicate problem. Some time ago, Robert Waterbury, an American novelist, was found shot dead on Fortunato's patch - officially a drugs deal gone bad. But now the Americans are sending someone over - though nobody's sure why they've sent Athena, a human rights professor - and the case is reopened. Athena soon finds that here in Buenos Aires, the truth is way down anyone's list of priorities. Corruption seeps from the city's every pore in this gritty, atmospheric thriller, where no one is quite what they claim to be, and you have to pick your heroes from the bad, the very bad and the indescribably worse."
Not dead yet: just doing a lot of snowboarding this winter as a reward for finishing up a new novel, called The Army of the Republic, about insurgency, set mostly in Seattle, USA in the very near future. It took three years to write, as opposed to 8 months for 17 Stone Angels, and is a lot more complex and, well, a better book. It's really about the War between Words and pictures. My agent has it now: we'll see how it shakes out.
ReplyDeleteNot a crime thriller, but it does start with an assassination and features it's share of bombings, disappearances and the advent of the corporate death squad. I guess those are crimes, aren't they?
Next: maybe the great snowboarding novel . . .
Thanks for the interest.
S Archer Cohen