The Edge of America

1984. Miami. Enter the high-stakes world of South Florida’s drug culture, where a businessman with CIA ties is about to risk it all.

Bobby West is on the edge. As chief financial officer for a Miami holding company and a CIA front, he has overleveraged his business in the go-go 1980s financial culture. He turns to a deal-with-the-devil money laundering operation with a local gangster, Alexander French—a deal which quickly goes south when $3 million goes missing. Now Mr. French, a group of Cuban exiles, and an Israeli smuggler named Adriana Chekhov are all after Bobby West to pay up. With echoes of Iran-Contra and the Orwellian surveillance state, The Edge of America is a stunning thriller about greed, power, and the limits of the American dream.

“In The Edge of America, Jon Sealy thrusts us into the rancid heart of our country in 1984—the greed and unrelenting violence, the spiritual blindness, the domestic ennui. A teenage daughter steals $3 million from her father, who is beholden to everyone except himself. And the characters who surround him are a menagerie of free range sycophants and psychotics, the kind of men and women only a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky have been able to bring to life. But Jon Sealy does it in this astonishing novel, along with the topography, the diction, the textures and smells of Miami, the Keys, and the Appalachian redoubts. Sealy knows everything, no matter who we are, or how we live. By God, get this book and hold on for dear life.”

—Dennis Covington, National Book Award finalist for Salvation on Sand Mountain

“The Edge of America kept me up way too late, but I couldn’t put it down! Set in 1984 South Florida and populated with a multitude of dangerous characters including CIA operatives, Cuban exiles, gangsters, thugs, a gumshoe, an international assassin, drug runners, and a not-so-innocent missing teenage girl, Jon Sealy’s adrenaline-fueled, action packed journey through Miami’s dark underbelly and beyond will keep readers’ hearts racing through its final word and will leave them hungry for Sealy’s next captivating read.”

—Michel Stone, award-winning author of The Iguana Tree and Border Child

“Jon Sealy’s The Edge of America whips back and forth at a ferocious pace from the highest reaches of government to the lowliest of henchmen, racing from Miami to Charleston, Amsterdam to New York. No one can be taken at their word, and no one can be trusted in this white knuckle trip through the drug trade and the ripple effect of one bad decision.”

—James Scott, bestselling author of The Kept

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