Darien Dogs — Henry Shukman

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.