Ambitious, groundbreaking, and fiendishly funny, Novel Explosives travels down the mean streets of venture finance, money laundering, and the Juárez drug wars on a torrent of linguistic virtuosity infused with a rarefied business I.Q. and mastery of everything from philosophy to pharmaceuticals, poetry to thermobaric weaponry. While an amnesiac, two gunmen, and a venture capitalist entangle and entwine in a do-or-die search for identity, at the palpitating heart of this novel, at its roiling fundamental core, lies an agonizing reappraisal of the way America behaves in the world, a project as worthy and urgent as it gets.