Dishonest Days is a huge, fractured conspiracy novel about pharmaceutical damage, emerald smuggling, queer desire, corporate laundering, AIDS panic, art sabotage, activist mythmaking, podcasts, fugitives, and the long afterlife of crimes that nobody ever quite exposes cleanly. It wants to be a political thriller, a noir, a dossier novel, a queer epic, a corporate-corruption investigation, a heist story, and a multi-decade reckoning with the 1980s. Mostly, it is an overbuilt machine of names, locations, files, and half-connections that mistakes difficulty for seriousness.
The book opens in 1986 with Aspinex DP1024, a variant drug whose effects run through the entire novel like a bad chemical ghost. Fourteen women drown at the Khone Phapheng Falls between Laos and Cambodia after a boat carrying medication, luggage, and bodies goes into the water. The image is horrible: white boxes of Aspinex spinning downstream before the corpses. But the novel’s method is already visible. It gives a disaster in glittering fragments, then refuses ordinary clarity. Instead of building emotional force, it begins laying evidence.
At the same time, in Colombia, a second plot is being prepared. John Abano, operating around West Core interests and the Wildemann fortune, is involved in a scheme to move valuable Colombian emeralds out of Los Pasos. Miners are recruited to travel to Plains, Montana, and Dr Denis Soto surgically inserts cabochon emeralds under their skin. The emeralds are supposed to be removed once the men reach Wyoming. The plan immediately goes wrong. Copete slips away with stones in Bogotá. Sánchez removes and swallows his stones after being detained in Dallas. Morellos and Tesillo also remove and swallow theirs. Abano, furious and cheated, later shoots Morellos and Tesillo, cuts open their shoulders, and finds nothing. Paul Biaz, an insurance man from Figer, helps dispose of the bodies in the swampy ground around Lost Cabin, then sees a way to pay off his own debts to Dean Reeves and Warren Harlan by letting them supply drugs to the Colombian miners at Plains.
