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A Novel
by Moisés Naím
From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Power comes an edge-of-your-seat political thriller about rival spies, dangerous love, and one of history's most devastating revolutions.
Venezuela, 1992. Unknown colonel Hugo Chávez stages an ill-fated coup against a corrupt government, igniting the passions of Venezuela's poor and catapulting the oil-rich country to international attention. For two rival spies hurriedly dispatched to Caracas―one from Washington, DC, and the other from Fidel Castro's Cuba―this is a career-defining mission.
Smooth-talking Iván Rincón of Cuba's Intelligence Directorate needs a rebel ally to secure the future of his own country. His job: support Chávez and the revolution by rallying the militants and neutralizing any opposing agents.
Meanwhile, the CIA's Cristina Garza will do everything in her power to cut Chávez's influence short. Her priority: stabilize the greatest oil reserves on the planet by ferreting out and eliminating Cuba's principal operative.
As Chávez surges to power, Iván and Cristina are caught in the fallout of a toxic political time bomb: an intrepid female reporter and unwitting informant, a drug lord and key architect in Chávez's rise, and personal entanglements between the spies themselves. With everything at stake, the adversaries find themselves at the center of a game of espionage, seduction, murder, and shifting alliances playing out against the precarious backdrop of a nation in free fall. A thrilling fictional story based on unimaginable real-life events.
"Naím wields his experiences as an international affairs writer and former Venezuelan economic cabinet member to provide authoritative insights into the severe economic downturns and rises in violence stemming from the power plays of external actors seeking to exploit a vulnerable nation in turmoil. This is a must for anyone who wants to explore this tumultuous and often strange period in modern Latin American history." —Publishers Weekly
"A nail-biting modern-history thriller set in 1990s Venezuela, Two Spies in Caracas: A Novel is a tale of crisscross alliances, easily betrayed…Intense, and written with the realism drawn directly from the author's personal experience serving as a former member of Venezuela's economic cabinet, Two Spies in Caracas is enthusiastically recommended especially for connoisseurs of the genre." —Midwest Book Review
"[A] sharp, effective indictment of Hugo Chávez and the late tyrant's brand of authoritarian populism." —Foreign Affairs
This information about Two Spies in Caracas was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Moisés Naím is a Venezuelan author and prize-winning journalist whose writing on international affairs is read worldwide, appearing in such publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, TIME, El País, and many others. He is the author of twelve nonfiction books, including Illicit and the New York Times bestseller The End of Power. A former contributing editor to The Atlantic, Naím was also the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine for fourteen years. Two Spies in Caracas, his first work of fiction, is based on his experience as a former member of Venezuela's economic cabinet. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family. For more information visit www.moisesnaim.com.
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