Release date: August 1, 2021, Amazon Crossing

A “gripping political thriller that immerses the reader in the volatile Bolivarian revolution led by Venezuelan army colonel Hugo Chávez…This is a must for anyone who wants to explore this tumultuous and often strange period in modern Latin American history.” – Publishers Weekly

Mark your calendars for this fantastic virtual book tour for TWO SPIES IN CARACAS by Moisés Naím and translated into English by the talented Daniel Hahn.

Moisés Naím has been called “one of the world’s leading thinkers” (Prospect Magazine) and is one of today’s most widely read columnists on international economics and geopolitics. In the early 1990s, he served as Venezuela’s Minister of Trade and Industry, as director of Venezuela’s Central Bank, and as executive director of the World Bank. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC and a best-selling author of 14 nonfiction books, including the New York Times bestseller The End of Power, which was selected by the Washington Post and the Financial Times as one of the best books of 2013. Naím’s background and extensive knowledge of the rise and fall of Venezuela in the 21^st century offer the perfect foundation for his debut novel.

SYNOPSIS:

TWO SPIES IN CARACAS is the best combination of historical fiction, spy thriller and romance set against the passions and betrayals of Hugo Chavez’s revolution. Although fiction, the story is inspired by more than two decades of research, as well as Naím’s direct access to the best-informed sources about what happened in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.  The result is a captivating page turner based on unimaginable real-life events.

Venezuela, 1992. Unknown colonel Hugo Chávez stages an ill-fated coup against a 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: control 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Moisés Naím is an internationally syndicated columnist and the host and producer of Efecto Naím, an Emmy winning weekly television program on international affairs that has been aired throughout the Americas since 2012 via NTN24/DirecTV. Naím was the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine for 14 years and is the author of many scholarly articles and 15 books on international economics and politics. In 2011, he received the Ortega y Gasset prize, the most prestigious award for journalism in the Spanish language. His 2013 book, “The End of Power”, a New York Times bestseller, was selected by the Washington Post and the Financial Times as one of the best books of the year. In the early 1990s, Naím served as Venezuela’s Minister of Trade and Industry, as director of Venezuela’s Central Bank, and as executive director of the World Bank.  He was previously professor of business and economics and dean of IESA, Venezuela’s leading business school. Dr. Naím holds MSc and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lives in Washington, DC. For more information visit https://www.moisesnaim.com/.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR:

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor, and translator with nearly seventy books to his name. He chaired the Translators Association for two years and served four years as a director of the British Centre for Literary Translation and four years as editor of the journal In Other Words. Recent translations include Juan Pablo Villalobos’s I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, Julián Fuks’s Resistance, and Carola Saavedra’s Blue Flowers. For more information, visit www.danielhahn.co.uk.