Mark Jacobs is one of my favorite storytellers. A fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, he’s worked in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, always attracted to places that are not tourist havens. I first learned of him reading The Stone Cowboy, in which a burnt-out American doper, fresh from a Bolivian prison, connives with a naive social worker while helping her find her magician brother—and ends up conducting her on a tour of the hell that is the coca trade. This is Jacobs’ first book in thirteen years, and he introduces the reader to a different kind of hell set […]