Darien Dogs - Tapa dura

Jim Rogers once had everything: a successful career, the love of a beautiful woman, a Manhattan penthouse and more money than he knew what to do with. Now it had all gone wrong and he was in a seedy hotel in Panama realising that the prostitute he'd just been with had stolen his wallet. Though it wasn't the money he was worried about but a sheet of folded paper, which he'd just been given by the mysterious Albert Jones: a piece of paper that might have saved his life. The search for the girl and the stolen document lead the two men deep into the Darien archipelago - a primitive, treacherous idyll that seems like Paradise but may in fact be Hell. The short novel, Darien Dogs, and the four stories that accompany it, mark the fictional debut of an assured and thrillingly gifted writer. With his disaffected, morally riven characters caught up in exotic, ambiguous Edens, there are echoes of Graham Greene - but Henry Shukman's writing has an imaginative depth, an erotic, muscular charge, and a dark, compulsive energy all its own.

Henry Shukman has worked as a trombonist, a trawlerman and a travelwriter. He is also a prize-winning poet. His first poetry collection, In Doctor No's Garden, was published by Cape in 2002. Darien Dogs is his first work of fiction.