The edge of america

Southern Independent Booksellers Association OKRA PICK selection

Jon Sealy’s arresting follow-up to The Whiskey Baron takes you into the go-go world of Miami 1984.

Drugs. Money. The CIA. Delve into the simmering world of 1984 Miami in this fast-paced noir about a $3 million heist and a businessman willing to put everything on the line.

Bobby West is on the edge. As chief financial officer for a Miami holding company and a CIA front, he has over-leveraged his business in the go-go 1980s financial culture. He turns to a deal-with-the-devil money laundering operation with a local gangster, Alexander French—a deal which quickly goes south when $3 million goes missing. Now Mr. French, a group of Cuban exiles, and an Israeli smuggler named Adriana Chekhov are all after Bobby West to pay up. With echoes of Iran-Contra and the Orwellian surveillance state, The Edge of America is a stunning thriller about greed, power, and the limits of the American dream.

Before the $3 million went missing, before the bombing, before the manhunt shut Miami down in late April 1984, Bobby West and the woman who was not his wife stood naked together in the shower. A sparrow-plump man of early middle age, with watery gray-blue eyes and woefully Germanic skin, West idled under the beating hot water and thought of nothing.
— from The Edge of America

praise for the edge of america

“A finely crafted, serious-minded novel of overreach and deadly consequences.” Kirkus Reviews

“Sleek and steely, The Edge of America spins a yarn that's darker, dirtier and deeper than what you might remember from Miami Vice.” —Jay Strafford, The Fredericksburg Free-lance Star

“This is Miami Vice, but the pastels are tinged by those long shadows of The Maltese Falcon, during a dangerous stakeout in a Carl Hiaasen alley.” Richmond Magazine

“In The Edge of America, Jon Sealy thrusts us into the rancid heart of our country in 1984 — the greed and unrelenting violence, the spiritual blindness, the domestic ennui ... Sealy knows everything, no matter who we are, or how we live. By God, get this book and hold on for dear life.” —Dennis Covington, National Book Award finalist for Salvation on Sand Mountain

“Jon Sealy's adrenaline-fueled, action packed journey through Miami’s dark underbelly and beyond will keep readers’ hearts racing through its final word and will leave them hungry for Sealy's next captivating read.” —Michel Stone, award-winning author of The Iguana Tree and Border Child

“Jon Sealy's The Edge of America whips back and forth at a ferocious pace from the highest reaches of government to the lowliest of henchmen, racing from Miami to Charleston, Amsterdam to New York. No one can be taken at their word, and no one can be trusted in this white knuckle trip through the drug trade.” —James Scott, bestselling author of The Kept

The Edge of America is a complex, layered knockout of a literary crime novel that's at once entertaining, educational, and artistic.” —Philip Elliott, author of Nobody Move

Florida

The Edge of America was published by Les Arènes in France in 2023.