Chagos Archipelago

A Spanish woman trying to retire as an assassin, a French Foreign Legion deserter from Madagascar, a mysterious (perhaps CIA) woman from America, a billionaire military contractor, and a man wandering the seas alone on a sailing ship bump into each other in the Indian Ocean, and not all of them survive.

Mónica has had enough of her life as a contract killer when she meets lonely wanderer Frank Baltimore in a stupidly expensive resort in Madagascar. A few hundred miles away, Alain has had more than enough of his solitary post on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and so when the mysterious Skye offers him a job, he says yes--he doesn't know if she is CIA, Wagner, Darkwater, or a gangster, but he wants in. She takes him to Diego Garcia, the top-secret US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, for training. Things turn ugly and deadly when a man from Frank's past turns up trying to break into the lucrative, secretive, already crowded world of paramilitary contractors. He, Monica, Alain, and Skye end up on his bad side and turn to each other for help.

Tom Lutz is the award-winning author of Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums and over a dozen other books, including fiction, travel narrative, and cultural history. His work has been translated into 12 languages and featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, and many more. Lutz is the founding editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books, producing numerous literary pieces, books, films, and podcasts. A former Distinguished Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, he splits his time between Los Angeles and southern France.