An astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro's revolution - a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. Young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom. When the cane fields start to burn, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming.

"Set in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s, in the days leading up to the Revolution--Manchette's unfinished masterpiece with a fearless female protagonist. Four of the ten titles in Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated 1970s cycle of hard-boiled novels, which the author originally dubbed neo-polars, or "neo-crime novels," have now appeared in English translation. Manchette is beginning to have a significant following among English-language readers,...