Madness Is Better Than Defeat

In a Virginia warehouse in 1959, Zonulet, a journalist-turned-CIA agent, pores through a massive archive of documents, searching for evidence that will clear his name. In so doing, he provides a long and twisty account of his attempt to locate two groups of Americans who traveled to Spanish Honduras in 1938 and vanished without a trace. One group, financed by a New York industrialist, was sent to find a sacred Mayan temple, deconstruct it, and bring it back to the United States. The other was a film crew from Los Angeles sent to find the same temple and use it as a backdrop for a Hollywood comedy. The standoff in the jungle would keep them there for years, and a more fanciful cast of characters would be hard to imagine. Among them are a Cambridge ethnologist hoping to secure her academic reputation, a malicious gossip columnist who wields power by virtue of the secrets he has uncovered, and a Nazi war criminal who convinces the news-starved people of both groups that the war ended peacefully with a German-American alliance.