The Hot Country: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller Audiobook

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.

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"From Pulitzer Prize winner Butler comes this exceptionally well-executed novel about a newspaper man caught up in revolutionary Mexico. Christopher Marlowe Cobb ('Kit') is a Chicago journalist living in the tumultuous time right before the First World War plunged all into total chaos and anarchy. Employing a young pickpocket to be his eyes and ears in Vera Cruz, Kit watches with the professional, removed nature of a journalist as the United States invades... then finds himself drawn into much larger affairs while investigating German activity in the area. Oftentimes in historical fiction , character (and even plot) can get lost while the author writes about "just how quaint everything was back then"; not so in The Hot Country, where setting is real without being overbearing. Furthermore, Kit is a thoroughly believable and fallible character whose wants, desires, and history serve as a major driving factor in the narrative. As Butler himself says, "If Ernest Hemingway and Indiana Jones had a bastard son, he would be Christopher Marlowe Cobb." Pancho Villa, Woodrow Wilson, and the fate of the world resting on the shoulders of one American journalist. Read this book. --Alex"

— Mysterious (5 out of 5 stars)