Siskal Bonifante is a Mexican-American immigration lawyer who is accustomed to managing his practice in Washington D.C. on the sleazy side - high volume and low quality for whatever the market will bear. His world takes a turn when his Russian nanny clients start disappearing and he finds himself caught in a federal investigation for sex-trafficking, and the bad guys take him for a ride to find out how much he knows - and try to bury him! The judge who was going to hear his Nicaraguan client's asylum case is murdered and Siskal is contracted to find the murderer - by the dead judge speaking to him from the grave. His investigation leads him from the hot Latino salsa clubs in Washington's Hispanic barrios to the corridors of power on Capitol Hill. What he uncovers leads him on a race against time to stop the executioner's knife before it strikes again. Jonathan Worlde's ground-breaking novel Latex Monkey with Banana was winner of the prestigious Hollywood Magnum Discovery Award and became a cult classic. The offbeat style was described as "like Kinky Freidman if he had a Latino soul." Deep in the Cut was a finalist (under a different title) in the annual St. Martin's Best Private Eye Novel contest. Jonathan Worlde's series explores the culture of America's undocumented immigrants who try to survive in an underground cutthroat world of alien -dope-gun smuggling and who struggle to feed their families while avoiding the knock of immigration agents at their doors. Kirkus Reviews: "Impressive are his colorful portraits of la Raza, the Central American immigrants who populate this tale, including Bonifante's ex-brother-in-law (a Latino FBI agent) and the hookers, housekeepers and clients who deal with the lawyer every day. Readers will be drawn to Bonifante despite his mistakes and confusion...Bonifante's goofy charm, keen self-perception and wily ambition make for quite the escapade."
About the Author: Jonathan Worlde is the nom de plume of a criminal defense lawyer and a very high-level official in the Department of Justice. He explains that he chose that moniker at the time of publication of his first book, Latex Monkey with Banana in 2002, because otherwise he ran the likelihood of having government censors reviewing and butchering his work. Since Latex Monkey has become such a cult classic he decided to continue with the Jonathan Worlde identity for his noir mysteries and certain other works of fiction. His first career was in film production; he worked in the U.S. and in Germany making news and documentary films. He developed an appreciation and love for both the graphics and psychology of film noir. He writes neo-noirs in the tradition of the great classics, with particular attention to the visual aspects of storytelling he learned as a filmmaker.