2021 Best Independent Book Award winner, 2021 Minnesota Book Awards finalist, and 2021 IAN Book of the Year Awards finalist.

Antonio Espinar, capo of Mexico's nefarious Las Brujas cartel and foosball fanatic, has no love for the media. In fact, he has a history of hanging the corpses of reporters he's murdered from highway overpasses as a sign to stay out of his business. So if a journalist could get an interview with him and survive it, they would no doubt get the attention of everyone in the world--including the Pulitzer board. But it would take someone fearless to do it.

Travel writer Nick Ripley is not fearless. He's desperate. Desperate to win his wife back after losing their life savings in a real-estate scam. Desperate enough to not only interview Espinar face to face, but to offer to write the man's biography--for a paltry 10 million dollars.

Surprise: Espinar accepts.

Bigger surprise: Espinar pays out the 10 million in marijuana. An American ton of grade-A bobo bush.

Saddled with this burdensome prize, Nick and his sticky-fingered fixer, Manu Paulo, must find a way to smuggle their truckload of contraband across the border and sell it to reap their payday. Further complicating matters, Manu liberated Espinar's prized pet emu, Idiota, before their departure.

Now, Espinar wants their heads--and his bird back. A modern Amazonian village wants to keep them as sex slaves. An oddball trio of criminals with a penchant for the occult and explosives wants to steal their goods. And every law enforcement agency from Mexico City to Manitoba wants them locked up.

Can they escape with their lives and come away with a fortune? Or will they find themselves digging their own graves in the middle of cartel country?