Ethan, haunted by guilt in the wake of his wife's tortured descent into madness, loses himself in a lawless and sensual world when he crosses the US's southern border.
Wandering without hope in a place that obeys only raw power, he meets a woman who saves his life and, in return, extracts his promise to rescue her sister, Mirabelle, from a Central American country on the brink of revolution before Mirabelle can be lured into deeper danger by the false coyote Soto. Pursued through crumbling cities and down a jungle river, Ethan finds himself in a country where personal and political traumas converge in a guerrilla war in which the sides are unclear and the stakes beyond reckoning. Ethan sought absolution and relief when he abandoned everything he knew, but to save Mirabelle, he must make a choice that will place him far beyond the borders of redemption.
Horse Latitudes is a lushly-written modern gothic — part thriller, part nightmarish journey into the moral uncertainty at the heart of the American experience in Central America.