Peacekeeping

When Terry White, a former deputy sheriff and a failed politician, goes broke during the Great Recession, he takes a job training the Haitian police for the United Nations. He's sent to the remote town of Jérémie, where there are more coffin makers than restaurants, more donkeys than cars, and the dirt roads all slope down sooner or later to the postcard sea. Terry is swept up in the town's complex politics when he befriends an earnest, reforming American-educated judge. But when Terry falls in love with the judge's wife, the electoral drama threatens to become a disaster. Edgy, daring, tightly plotted, and surprisingly funny, Peacekeeping confirms Berlinski's far-reaching gifts as a novelist. Like Fieldwork, it explores a part of the world that is as fascinating as it is misunderstood-and takes us into the depths of the human soul, where the thirst for power and the need for love can overrun judgment and morality.

Mischa Berlinski is the author of the novel Fieldwork, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Addison M. Metcalf Award.