A Good Day to Die

Coltrane's ambitious, if compact, debut is a speculative military thriller set in Cuba in the months after Fidel Castro's death. Jorge Ortega, an American operative of Cuban descent, is dispatched by the ""Company"" to Santa Rosa, where he and a band of local rebels are to seize the radio station, synchronizing their attack with a massive landing of military forces. This is more a novel of conscience than confrontation, and subplots overwhelm the initial clarity of the mission. Ortega, whose martyred grandfather died during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, is disillusioned and emotionally scarred. He's been in combat in Honduras, Belize, Colombia, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Though he prefers ""being on the right side,"" this time he is haunted by his previous assignment in El Salvador and the death of a woman named Catalina. He also battles stark memories of his father's suicide. The ragtag guerrillas, already a divisive, amateurish and jealousy-prone lot, are further split when Ortega has an affair with Gloria, a disfigured woman loved by one of the rebels. If this isn't complicated enough, Ortega does not trust his own superior, Forbes, and is uncertain if there is even going to be an invasion. It is possible that the rebels, severely outmanned and ill-equipped, are merely sacrificial decoys. Ortega, however, appears not to care whether he is on a suicide mission, be it military or emotional. Despite some distracting lexical lapses (""the smoke came into focus, roiling up oilily""), Coltrane's narrative style--more literary than Tom Clancy's, less so than Robert Stone's--achieves its limited objectives. Ultimately, however, his attempt to transcend the military thriller genre with a literary interiority traps this narrative in a formidable category crisis. (May)