Death in the Rainy Season

Publisher: Cuidono Press

Recently widowed, Sarah Laforge arrives in Zaire to take up her new post at the U.S. Embassy, determined to find meaningful work. The year is 1989 and the expatriate Europeans and Americans Sarah encounters in Kinshasa live in a privileged world where they drink, flirt, and gossip about who is sleeping with whom. But throughout all of this petty activity important business is getting done. Information is being gathered. Big power plays are being made. Jacques Delpech, a Belgian businessman born and raised in Zaire, also moves in these circles. His deep commitment to the country opens up another world for Sarah, while her idealism and openness help to soften his own pain. As a plot to overthrow the dictator Mobutu gains momentum, power, corruption, and sexual jealousy threaten to shatter their idyllic love affair.

For several years in the eighties, Mary Martin Devlin lived in Kinshasa, Zaire, and came to know the breathtaking beauty of the country, along with its squalor and misery, the chronic political maneuvering, the abusive power of corporations like big oil, and, of course, the expatriate life. She draws on these experiences to bring to life the dissolute community of Westerners in Third World countries where easy living and dangerous intrigue blend together in a deceptive haze.

Devlin is the author of Precious Pawn (Cuidono, 2014). She has translated and collaborated on books regarding the African AIDS epidemic and the politics of the Congo, including Chief of Station, Congo, which chronicles her husband's experiences in Cold War-era Africa. Her story "The Resting Wall" was short-listed for the O. Henry Prize in 2003. She divides her time between Atlanta, Georgia, and the south of France.