Dog soldiers - Robert Stone

In Saigon during the last stages of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong. His courier disappears, probably with his wife, and a corrupt Fed wants Converse to find him the drugs, or else.

Dog Soldiers is a frightening, powerful, intense novel that perfectly captures the underground mood of the United States in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered the violent world of cops on the make and professional killers.

'In this painfully funny and bitterly pungent book, [Stone] picks up "Vietnam" - not the place, but the meaning two decades have given it - and dumps it smack in America's teeming lap; a feat which must place him . . . among the leading writers of his generation' Sunday Time s

'Can be read as a Conrad-like moral fable about Vietnam's legacy of corruption to America, or simply as a Ross MacDonald-style thriller. Either way, it is exceptionally powerful' A. Alvarez

'Robert Stone is that rare thing, a novelist who goes straight to the heart of the modern inferno' John Banville