Headhunter Jazz (English Edition)

"Headhunter Jazz is a delight. It's a wise, witty, exotic, and sexy novel with enough memorable characters for a trilogy. A splendid book." - Ross Thomas (1988) Edgar Winner for Briarpatch and Cold War Swap

It's morning again in America.

The secret war in Laos, the very noisy drug wars, and purges in the intelligence community have set a lot of very spooky and dangerous people from the shadow world adrift into free agency. Many new teams are bidding for talent. The game is changing fast as all the rules are being rewritten.

Reagan is in the White House, the Iran-Contra hearings are on all three channels, and the cocaine cartels scramble to control strategically selected countries that can be used for production, banking, and airstrips.

Charlie is coming down from the snow in the mountains to his quiet life in the East Bay of San Francisco, hoping to find solace with his piano, but finding instead his living room is the set for an X-rated photo shoot, orchestrated by Easy Money, the one woman who knows where all his buttons are because she installed many of them.

Charlie has a gift for jazz chord progressions, foreign languages, and surrounding himself with women and chemicals that, however stimulating, may not be good for him. He moves comfortably among an eclectic collection of friends, acquaintances and adversaries in that shadow world where espionage, crime, and intelligence operations overlap and blur.

But now Charlie just wants to get the music back, and show some personal growth, or at least some good sense and improved survival instincts.

His piece of the demimonde, however, still has other plans for him.

Manny Weise, a semi-retired macher from the Mob heyday in Havana, needs a favor. A kid from an important Cuban family has a fondness for gambling and cocaine that has become life-threatening. Charlie knows a lot about that, so Manny wants him to set the boy straight with the sermon of the saved sinner. If only it were that easy and that safe.

Then The Headhunter makes an unexpected late-night appearance in his house to tempt him to adventure and riches using his diverse talents as a fool for hire. Pagan Sloane knows how to exploit his weakness for an adrenaline rush and wants Charlie to go on a quest to rescue The Angel, a grande horizontale with some good intelligence, many bad habits, and a homicidal drug lord boyfriend who believes she betrayed him. The Angel was once one of Charlie's addictions, so Pagan feels he is just the man for the job.

The job will include a militia of delusional wannabees, former spooks gone rogue in the free market, old warriors from the secret war in Laos who never quite figured out what Charlie was doing there, and a crazy old heiress with a castle in the High Sierras who calls herself the White Duchess and thinks a conman who claims government connections can make her a queen. And everyone has their own private army, hiring indigenous people from three continents to fight in a war that is not theirs.

Headhunter Jazz is about the things that compel us and the things that endanger us and even the things that ennoble us, and where they overlap. It's about tribes and teams and loyalties, private armies in secret wars, and who has skin in the game and who is just a tourist or a grifter.

When Charlie left college, the Foundation of the Blindmen and the Elephant lured him down the rabbit hole, promising he wouldn't get bored, have to wear a uniform, or get a haircut.

And his mentor, an old hand from the OSS, convinced him that he would "be on the side of the Angels more often than not."

This book is a work of picaresque noir that examines the wages of sin, where the music comes from, and what is worth fighting for.

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