Roland Nair, a Danish-American with a NATO intelligence job and a private agenda, flies into Freetown to meet his old friend Michael Adriko, a Ugandan special forces soldier who is charming, unreliable, and possibly running a scam involving enriched uranium. They head east through Sierra Leone into Congo and Uganda with Michael’s American fiancée, and everybody is lying to everybody, including to themselves. Johnson wrote it late, and it’s his spy novel — funny, paranoid, and beautifully written, with a very clear view of the aid workers, contractors, and intelligence people circulating through that part of the world.
The Laughing Monsters