The Hemingway Thief

Starred review from May 16, 2016
Henry “Coop” Cooper, the narrator of Harris’s stellar debut, is thinking about murder—of his own pseudonym. When his first literary novel is widely panned, he turns to writing vampire romance novels under an assumed name—which are immediate bestsellers, to his unending shame and his agent’s glee. In remote Pendira, Mexico, Coop is taking a break on his agent’s orders, when he and Grady Doyle—the new owner of the dive hotel and bar Coop inhabits—interrupt the beating of a grifter, Ebenezer Milch, who has quite the story to tell. In Paris of 1922, an uncle of Milch’s stole the legendary suitcase containing Ernest Hemingway’s papers, and now a book collector with nefarious ties and hired assassins is after the suitcase. Coop winds up traveling across cartel-laden Mexico in a battered RV with an ex-DEA agent, a former hit man, and Milch in search of the suitcase, finding himself out of his depth at every turn. Filled with charming pop-culture references, this deft caper novel is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and poignant. Agent: Brent Taylor, Triada US Literary Agency.