An Ocean Away by Mike Aldridge

A friend of mine sent me this book, written by a friend of hers. It's a story about a Mexican drug dealer, Jose, who has gotten himself into quite a pickle. He was raised in an orphanage, adopted out to child molesters, whom he murdered and robbed and then ran away. He ends up in a coastal fishing village, where he comes to the attention of one of the local drug lords, who puts him and his best friend to work running drugs.

All goes well until his friend is caught and "turned" by the DEA and begins feeding them information which leads to Jose getting stopped by them twice in a row on drug runs. He is able to ditch the drugs at sea before the DEA gets to his boat, but it's obvious that they're onto him, and the drug lord, Robles, tells him to take a break for a while, get out of town.

Instead of taking the time off and just enjoying his ill-gotten gains, he decides while he's in Baja to start up his own drug operation, and things just get worse from that point on.

I have to be perfectly honest here and say that I didn't like this story very well. When the protagonist is as amoral as Jose, I just can't cheer him on. Throw in a DEA agent who is corrupt and evil, and there's pretty much no one left to care about.

The only redeeming thing in Jose's case was when he meets a woman, Lucy, who runs an orphanage and falls in love with her, supposedly experiencing some sort of spiritual awakening. As soon as they are separated, however, he sleeps with whores and keeps up his drug dealing - justifying it with the though that he'll give the money to the orphanage, and it will all be ok, because it's "for the children". Pretty well dashed my hopes that he'd become a worthy protagonist.

Unless you like novels like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, where nothing goes well, and everyone behaves perfectly rottenly, give this one a pass.