It's an otherwise ordinary week in April, the week after Easter, 2009.
Late in the week, a man wakes up in Guanajuato, Mexico with his
knowledge intact, but with no memory of who he is, or how he came to
live in Guanajuato. Early in the week, a venture capitalist sits at his
desk in an office tower in Los Angeles, attempting to complete his
business memoirs, but troubled by the fact that a recent deal appears to
be some sort of money-laundering scheme. And in the middle of the week,
just before dawn on April 15, two gunmen arrive at an El Paso motel to
retrieve a duffel bag stuffed full of currency, and eliminate the man
who brought it to El Paso. Thus begins the three-stranded narrative of
Novel Explosives, a fiendishly funny search for identity that travels
through the worlds of venture finance, the Juarez drug wars, and the
latest innovations in thermobaric weaponry, a joyride of a novel with
only one catch: the deeper into the book you go, the more dangerous it
gets. At the palpitating heart of the novel, at its roiling fundamental
core, lies an agonizing reappraisal of the way the U.S behaves in the
world, a project that grows more urgent by the day.
