This sumptuously written thriller asks probing questions about how we
live with each other and with our planet.
The Cobra is a hard man in a brutal world. Expelled from El Salvador
after a drug bust and working as a Guatemalan businessman's enforcer, he
meets and comes to admire Polo, a human rights campaigner who defends
the Mayan people. When the Cobra's boss orders him to murder Polo, a
last-minute stab of conscience brings him into conflict with
drug-dealing oligarchs. Now a marked man, he's offered a chance to
escape to a remote Mayan community facing down its own assassin: the
encroaching mining companies who want the land regardless of their
impact on the planet. Can the Cobra change his solipsistic ways and
learn to defend a culture caught in the crosshairs of another kind of
battle? By the writer Roberto Bolaño has called the most rigorous of his
generation, Rodrigo Rey Rosa's The Country of Toó is gripping thriller
about power and redemption.