In his long-awaited new thriller, James Park Sloan plunges the reader into a world populated by commodities speculators and tenured professors, CIA section chiefs and free-lance technology dealers.

One typical denizen is Keith McCallum, a modestly successful professor and some-time family man who revives one of his student articles with a view to publication. The article, which reexamines the overthrow of Indonesian dictator Sukarno, creates a ripple of distaste in academic circles, but attracts the generous attention of a Texas oil millionaire, who offers McCallum a lucrative consulting job in Jakarta. Meanwhile, McCallum and his friends begin a stock-buying spree in the hopes of cashing in on some hunches about the Texan's acquisition plans.

But the Jakarta trip turns nasty. Heavily armed parties unknown seem determined to turn our professor's theory on its head —turning him, meanwhile, into a corpse.

And to make matters worse, his stock tips seem to be duds.

The Last Cold-War Cowboy depicts a curious region that we haven't seen before, where scholarship, business, and espionage overlap. The book simultaneously reveals an ingenious puzzle that dramatizes the interplay of world finance and geopolitics. But best of all, this is a suspense novel in the grand tradition, a true thriller written with brains, heart, and humor.