Four Days To Veracruz

Title: Four Days To Veracruz: A Novel
Published by: Simon & Schuster
Release Date: June 9, 2003
Authors: Owen West
ISBN13: 978-0743229821
Buy the Book: Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble

 
Overview

With style and nonstop action, Owen West, winner of the Boyd literary award for best military novel of 2001, returns with Four Days to Veracruz — an adventure-thriller that sizzles with international intrigue, relentless suspense, and straight-from-the-headlines consequences.
Darren Phillips is a presidential aide, a Harvard graduate, a decorated Desert Storm veteran, and now a husband. Kate North, his new wife, is a world-class adventure racer whom he met on an Eco-Challenge endurance team. When an out-of-bounds kayaking excursion on the couple’s honeymoon in Mexico lands them on the private beach of a violent drug dealer, their exotic getaway suddenly turns deadly. And Darren and Kate are, staggeringly, fugitives.

The couple flees desperately on foot across the badlands of the Sierra Madre, unwittingly carrying a piece of the drug cartel’s encrypted communication code with them. As they race toward Veracruz, they are pursued by corrupt Mexican police, federales, and bloodhounds.More terrifying, they are pursued by a man known as El Monstruo Carnicero — “The Monster Butcher” — a serial killer dispatched from the bloody desert of Juarez by the leader of the Mexican drug cartel. In all their military training, in all their endurance challenges, Darren and Kate have never before been tested as they are now, running for their lives across the wild belly of Mexico.

Praise

“Second military thriller by West (Sharkman Six, 2001). West, himself a Marine captain and commodities trader for Goldman, Sachs, has taken a leave of absence to return to active Marine infantry forces. He has also raced in six ECO Challenges and reached 28,000 feet on the north face of Everest. So it’s no stretch when his hero Darren Phillips follows his bride-to-be, Kate North, on an ECO Challenge endurance team in New Zealand, quickly marries her, and honeymoons on a kayak trip into the wilder parts of Mexico. A Marine major, Darren is military aide to the president (he carries the nuclear suitcase), while Kate is the world’s foremost female endurance champion, small-busted and sheathed in muscle. She’s founded an adventure academy for girls called You Go Girl! Now, who wouldn’t want to read about these two, thrust into the laps of murderous druglords and pursued on foot across the Sierra Madre by Mexican federales and the CIA-no rest, no sleep, and four grueling days to Vera Cruz? Meanwhile, hundreds of Mexicans have been murdered by a serial killer-and how will the Monster Butcher tie in with the honeymooners’ endurance race against their own would-be murderers? Other players include Suzanne Richards, deputy director of the CIA’s Crime and Narcotics Center, and third-generation Marine Gavin Kelly of Sharkman Six. West remains a potent thriller writer. Marines, suit up!”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Four Days to Veracruz starts with great premise, then escalates to a classic and breathtaking chase-and-escape. This is the best kind of action/adventure novel, the kind where you’re sucked right into the pages and find your heart beating faster than the people on the run. Owen West, a Marine, is a hell of a writer who obviously took the same escape-and-evasion course I took in the Army.”
— Nelson Demille, author of The General’s Daughter

“Owen West is the real deal. He writes what he knows, packing Four days with high-testosterone military intrigue, superbly credible jargon, and action sequences like none you’ve ever read. This cutting-edge adventure left me breathless.”
— Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code