The Cuban Affair

Starred review from July 3, 2017
Set in 2015 during the early days of the thaw between the U.S. and Cuba, this action-packed, relentlessly paced thriller from bestseller DeMille (The Quest) introduces Daniel “Mac” MacCormick, a 35-year-old army veteran wounded in Afghanistan and now living in Key West, Fla., as a charter boat captain. Crippled by debt—he has a $250,000 bank loan on his boat—and feeling existentially adrift, Mac agrees to participate in a covert mission to Cuba for a substantial sum. Financed by a faction of Cuban-Americans bent on freeing their ancestral home from Castro’s oppression and returning millions of dollars and property to their rightful owners, the job entails accompanying a beautiful woman to Havana and recovering a cache of money and documents hidden in a cave. But the plan is risky at best, and soon Mac is on the run with a woman who could be manipulating him. A line from the novel perfectly describes this page-turner: “Sex, money, and adventure. Does it get any better than that?” Agents: Jenn Joel and Sloan Harris, ICM Partners.

May 15, 2017

Charter fishing boat captain Daniel "Mac" MacCormick reluctantly agrees to hear why Miami lawyer Carlos wants to rent his boat for a ten-day fishing tournament to Cuba. With good reason: stunning Cuban American Sara Ortega hopes to recover the $60 million her grandfather hid somewhere in Cuba, and there's $2 million in it for Mac if he can stay alive.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2017
Old bones and old grudges in contemporary Havana.In this, his 20th, DeMille (Radiant Angel, 2015, etc.) deftly drops Daniel "Mac" MacCormick, captain of The Maine, a 42-foot sport fisherman out of Key West, into a storm of competing visions of Cuba's future. When a trio of Cubans and Cuban-Americans, Carlos Macia, Eduardo Valazquez, and the lovely Sara Ortega, offer him a small fortune to participate in a scheme to recover documents and cash hidden in a cave during the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Mac is tempted and succumbs to both avarice and lust for Sara. The plan is to infiltrate Mac and Sara into Cuba as part of an educational tour under the auspices of Yale University (and some fun is had at the expense of the Elis). The two will break away from the tour, recover the money and documents, meet The Maine, which will be participating in a fishing tournament down the coast, and escape. Relations with Cuba are in flux; the exile community rejects the notion of a "Cuban Thaw," and the security services in Cuba also resist the idea. But some in the U.S. promote a lessening of tensions, and some in Cuba itself understand that the nation cannot survive without a quick infusion of money and that the best hope is U.S. tourist dollars. The real poverty of Cuba is clearly described, as are the conditions of the infrastructure and the social climate. In spots the narrative seems to slog through discursive observations, but they are mostly informative and worthwhile, and then the plot picks up energy again. Though Mac and his mate Jack Colby seem to share a somewhat adolescent obsession with "getting laid," they are stout fellows in a fight, and the thriller charts a satisfying course. A good day's work from an old pro.

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Starred review from October 30, 2017
DeMille’s new hard-bitten hero, Daniel “Mac” McCormick, narrates this breathless adventure set in 2015, when Mac was crippled by debt and working as the captain of a Key West deep-sea fishing charter boat. An ex-Army man with medals and scars from two tours in Afghanistan, Mac is tough, cynical, smart, and suffering from malaise, an attitude mix that reader Brick smoothly conveys from the start. Mac lets Miami lawyer Carlos Macia talk him into participating in a complicated plan to smuggle millions of dollars out of Cuba, with the promise of a hefty paycheck at the end. The caper is chancy, and adding to its potential perils is his smuggling companion, Sara Ortega, a mysterious beauty who may have a secret agenda. In presenting the plot’s set-up, reader Brick takes time to establish Mac’s hard-boiled outlook; his fondness for his cantankerous septuagenarian first mate, Jack Colby; and his increasing skepticism about the caper, especially Sara’s participation. Once their plane touches down in Havana and the plan immediately begins to unravel, Mac displays his Army-nurtured aptitude for improvisation and author and reader together establish the kind of feverish, nonstop action one expects from a world-class thriller. A Simon & Schuster hardcover.

July 1, 2017
DeMille visited Cuba in 2015. He took a binderful of notes and displays them throughout this story of a Key West charter-boat owner who accepts a dangerous but well-paying job: he's to help Cuban expatriates recover millions of dollars stashed when they fled the island as Castro was coming to power. This is powerful, mythic stuff, like Confederate gold and Nazi treasure, and readers may wish DeMille had focused on it rather than emptying that binder. Some of the peripheral stuff is fascinating, like the dead woman whose body didn't decompose, so the Cubans made a shrine of her tomb. But too much reads like a tourist guide to the best hotels and restaurants. It slows and pads the narrative. But wait. As the true nature of the charter-boat owner's job becomesclear and the betrayals begin, DeMille mounts a long, magnificent sequence with boat chases, helicopter rescues, and tracer fire. They're all described in that visceral style the author has mastered. This is the DeMille of Plum Island (1997) and Night Fall (2004) and the one we want more of. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Whether at the top of his game or off stride just a bit, as he is here, DeMille has a built-in audience of eager readers, as his long run on various best-seller lists testifies.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)