It is time to die…

1989. It’s been three years since Captain Ajax Montoya cleared the smoke and blood from his last case—and what a three years. The old world order is coming down along with the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet “Evil Empire” is being born to the ash heap of history by its once captive people.

But in a psychiatric hospital in Managua, a near catatonic Ajax missed all that. In 1986, Ajax freed his only remaining friend from a psychotic killer. But his ‘methods’ were such that he was imprisoned in a nut-house for his pains. And for three years his world stood still.

But ghosts don’t know time nor read headlines. So when one of the many phantoms from Ajax’s bloody past shows up, he is rescued from his personal nightmare only to be plunged from one hell into another.

El Salvador in 1989 is in a civil war so vicious, they say even the Grim Reaper needs an escort. But when the parents of Ajax’s old love beg him to go there and save their son—as he did not save their daughter—Ajax is on the next plane.

And he’s not alone. Gladys Darío—the lieutenant whose rescue cost Ajax his freedom and his mind—has been stewing in Miami for three years, and she is ready to back his play, even if it costs her own life.

Now all they have to do is parachute into the hottest war in the Americas and find that one needle of a missing person in a haystack of the disappeared.

Joe Gannon's profile page

JOE GANNON, writer and spoken word artist, was a freelance journalist in Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution, writing forThe Christian Science Monitor,The Toronto Globe and Mail, and theSan Francisco Examiner. He spent three years in the army, graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and did his MFA at Pine Manor College. After a stint teaching high school in Abu Dhabi, he is now working on his next novel.

“Riveting…[Gannon] brings to the pages characters who feel utterly human in Kafkaesque situations that ring with authenticity.” —Hallie Ephron, The Boston Globe

“Impressive…It’s [Ajax Montoya’s] struggle to solve a murder that leads him into the era’s poisonous politics and occasions his razzle-dazzle deductive displays. These carry the book, along with the beautiful, emotion-drenched prose…A beauty.” —Booklist (starred review, Top 10 Crime Fiction Debuts of 2014)

“Night of the Jaguar is the real deal—a tightly wound thriller that's politically charged, atmospheric, and haunting. Gannon's story of a man on the verge and a country on the edge of war is a gripping ride from the get go, a fast paced crime story and a delicious fever dream rolled into one.” —Ivy Pochoda

“[A] riveting, action-packed, debut…Readers will eagerly await Gannon’s next book.” —Publishers Weekly