Koster reads from his new novel

by Eric Jackson

Panama’s most prolific and best-known English-language writer, Florida State University professor Richard M. Koster, held a reading from his new novel, "Glass Mountain," at the FSU Panama auditorium on May 23. The Brooklyn native and New York University and Yale graduate said that he drew heavily on his experience teaching soldier from the 8th Special Forces Group at Fort Gulick in 1965 to write this tale of "plausibly deniable" government operation to kidnap a well-guarded fugitive billionaire from a fictional Central American country.

Early in the story we meet Carlos, famous in certain circles for his one-man raids into North Vietnam, but lately making a living kidnapping children caught in the middle of their parents' bitter divorce wars. "He’s perfectly capable of killing you on the spot, or making you wish that he had." He’s also plagued by hallucinations, and as time goes by, the phantoms get worse.

Espousing the philosophy that "fear is healthy, but dread is sick," Professor Koster explained that "this whole book is about losing your nerve." Referring to his best-known work (at least in Panama), the nonfiction "In the Time of the Tyrants" that he co-wrote with La Prensa’s Guillermo Sánchez Borbon, Koster recalled his own rejuvenating confrontation with fear: "God sent me a savior, and his name was Manuel Antonio Noriega."

On the way to the book’s climax, the protagonist is set up, busted and tortured, just as a test. Koster said that it took months to figure out the escape scene, "and of course, by that time I’d already spent the advance on this book."

"Glass Mountain" is an action thriller, the stuff of which Colon bus movies are made. And of course, Koster’s hoping for exactly that. "The moment the movie deal is signed, take a good look at me, because I’m gone." It’s not that he doesn’t love Panama, he explained, but that there are so many other places that he wants to go.