The Last Dawn

November 2, 2015
A compelling story line and complex characters distinguish Gannon’s second novel featuring former Sandinista leader Ajax Montoya (after 2014’s Night of the Jaguar). In 1989, Margret Mary and James “Big Jim” Peck want to hire Ajax and his partner, Gladys Darío, to track down their 24-year-old son, Jimmy, who traveled to El Salvador for a U.S. senator to gather information on the country’s human rights record. For that to happen, Gladys needs to get Ajax discharged from a psychiatric hospital, where he’s been treated for aggression with medications that have left him catatonic. Fortunately for the Pecks, Ajax has just been shamming his diminished capacity, and he’s able to undertake the covert operation to try to save Jimmy. The plot integrates the violence of the region without contrivance, and Ajax, who’s haunted by the blood he’s shed in the past, is a well-developed lead. Some attempts at humor, however, won’t be to every taste. Agent: Lisa Gallagher, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates.

Starred review from January 1, 2016
The sequel to 2014's Night of the Jaguar is just as hard-hitting and impossible to put down. Set in 1989, about three years after the events in Jaguar, it finds Ajax Montoya, the former Sandinista commander turned police detective, in a psychiatric hospital in Managua, Nicaragua. (He's there because of what happened in Jaguar, but Gannon supplies enough background for readers new to the series.) Gladys Dario, Ajax's former partner, has been living in Miami, where she's approached by an American couple who are desperate to find their son, who went missing in El Salvador. They want Ajax's help, but apart from the logistical problem of getting him out of the hospital, there's another issue: the Americans' daughter, Amelia, was Ajax's lover. She is dead, and it's in many ways Ajax's fault. This tough-talking thriller, certain to keep readers glued to their seats, is set against the civil war in El Salvador and offers an absolutely gripping mix of fiction and fact. Pair this one and Night of the Jaguar with David Corbett's two equally hard-edged crime novels, also set in El Salvador, Do They Know I'm Running? (2010) and The Mercy of the Night (2015).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)