The Foreign Service Journal, November 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2020 59 East and Central Africa, first as a Peace Corps volunteer and then as a Foreign Service officer. He is the author of In the Aftermath of Genocide: The U.S. Role in Rwanda (2005). The Magician Alex Guissé, independently published, 2020, $13.99/paperback, e-book available, 265 pages. An amateur magician is summoned as part of a call by the great Xho’loman emperor who seeks all the magicians in his capital city. An invaluable heirloom ring has been stolen, and the emperor must recover it. The magician embarks on an adventurous journey, traveling through cities, savannas, jungles and villages. Equipped with magical items whose use he doesn’t fully understand, he narrowly escapes dangers and threats. Can the magician find the lost ring? Or will he be trampled, ambushed or destroyed by magical forces?The answers are all to be found in this book, which the author describes as a “strange and unconventional fairy tale” drawn from all the people he’s met, the places he’s lived and folktales from his ancestral culture. Alex Guissé is the pen name of a Foreign Service officer who joined USAID in 2016. He currently works with USAID/Senegal’s Economic Growth Office and is the mission’s authority on Dakar’s fecal sludge value chain. He hopes publishing his first book will enable him to stop talking about sewage when invited to dinner parties. Madrugada: A Carlos Cortez Novel Ryan Peterson, independently published, 2019, $12.99/paperback, e-book available, 298 pages. It’s 1961, and Carlos Cortez has traded the Belgian Congo for the comfortable life of a hotelier in downtown Cairo. But his peaceful life abruptly changes when his brother, Miguel, with whom Carlos hasn’t spoken in nearly 15 years, arrives in Egypt on an urgent matter. Miguel, a trust and estate attorney fromHouston, has discovered information that might reveal the final resting place of an eccentric Spanish oil magnate who disappeared years ago aboard his private jet. Cortez and Miguel take an expedition, along with cartographer Alia Hassan, deep into the Sahara Desert to look for a massive fortune. Along the way they encounter Russian assassins, warring Bedouin tribes and Algerian freedom fighters. Madrugada , Spanish for “daybreak,” is the second adventure in the Carlos Cortez series, a sequel to Conquistador (2018). Ryan Peterson is an American lawyer and diplomat. Originally fromMesa, Arizona, he worked as an attorney in public health care in Washington, D.C., prior to joining the Foreign Service. In the past few years, he has lived and worked in Ciudad Juarez, London and Bucharest. Mango Rains Anne H. Oman, Galaxy Galloper Press, 2020, $16/paperback, e-book available, 282 pages. Newly minted Foreign Service Officer Julia Galbraith arrives in Cambodia just short of her 23rd birthday. Relatively sleepy and peaceful compared to the tumult of the war raging next door in Vietnam, Phnom Penh is swept by the fresh mango rains that precede the monsoon season. But as the rains give way to the turbulent monsoon, world events such as the assassinations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam precipitate a crisis. A major diplomatic breakup is in the making, and Julia is on the front lines of a tottering relationship between the United States and Cambodia. Much of the drama in Mango Rains lies in the personal tragedies, ambitions and romantic liaisons among members of the diplomatic corps whom readers meet through Julia. Her own ill-fated love affair is one of many relationships nurtured, challenged and destroyed as the unforgiving monsoon breaks over wartorn Southeast Asia. Anne H. Oman began her career as a Foreign Service officer for the U.S. Information Agency. She served in Cambodia and Indonesia and was expelled from both countries for political, not personal, reasons. Since then she has worked principally as a journalist, and her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Star, Baltimore Sun, National Geographic World and many other publications. Currently, she is reporter- at-large for the Fernandina Observer in Fernandina Beach, Florida. She has also published four nonfiction books. Mango Rains is her first novel.