Ron Argo

The young UC graduate went to her father's beachside condo the night he was murdered, but she doesn't remember shooting him. Janice Parrish had plenty of reason to hate her father after recalling the horrible memories of the sexual abuse as a child some 20 years ago. But even as she's booked for the murder, she knows there was someone else at his house that night. So begins Janice's dark journey through a tortuous psychological wasteland of false memory and real murder.
 San Diego ace crime reporter Ray "Magic" Myers digs up evidence that turns the story into a media event and at once makes both him and Janice targets of a psychopath on a grisly pursuit of revenge.
 In a race against time to save Janice as well as his family, Myers must stop the stalker before more innocent people are slain.

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The heat suffocation of six campesinos inside an abandoned boxcar in the California desert was tragic enough before reporter Ray Myers discovers evidence that babies had been with them, babies gone missing. The trail to find them hurls the reporter into the dangerous world of international human trafficking.

The smuggling gang becomes crippled in chaos as mastermind Ricky Mendez devises a psychotic plan to snuff everyone related to the operation, including now a pesky reporter who keeps sniffing around in the wrong places.

Myers along with softhearted smuggler Maggie Frazier find themselves on the run from Mendez' henchmen while trying to rescue the babies from a ruthless Mexican trafficker who has hijacked the children. It's a race against time that drives them deep into Baja's Indian country and through the seamy back streets of Ensenada.

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Simon and Schuster had high hopes (ie. paid a nice sum) for a war novel called YEAR OF THE MONKEY and the novel was published to rave reviews followed by multiple bids for the paperback. But the book, in a blink, got lost in a culture of indifference over an unpopular war that folks wanted only to forget.  That was then, 30 years ago.

Flash forward to the aftermath of another costly and disgraceful errant war in what historically is only a blink of the eye in time and we see how the ignored lessons of Vietnam are more relevant than ever as we now exit another unwanted, unpopular, losing quagmire in Afghanistan.

This deeply human war thriller is not just a revelation of how and why Vietnam became a devastating political and social blunder, nor is it purely a nostalgic look at the young men who unwittingly took part in that shameful moment of American history, though both are as thematic to the story as the moral dilemmas forced on the protagonist in a world he can escape only by betrayal and murder--Much as the greater U.S. military did exiting Vietnam. It is a lesson in our history from which we have not learned.

Now comes the renewal of YEAR OF THE MONKEY, reissued by the author, first through the Authors Guild of America in 2003 as a quality paperback, and now as a digital book by Cliff Edge Publishing.

Recipient of the Pinnacle Achievement Award for Literary Fiction.

"Argo doesn't flinch from the raw nature of his subject matter, and his skillful narration makes this a visceral, memorable novel." -- Historical Novel Society Review

And from Kirkus Reviews:

"Argo successfully creates a profound, multilayered tapestry that's full of nuance. [His] first-person perspective creates a fragile aura around the unfolding events, and makes them wholly unpredictable … The authentic dialogue is especially effective; each restrained syllable conveys as much as a five-page soliloquy.
"In a style that's evocative of S.E. Hinton's classic works, with a dash of Daniel Woodrell's Southern grit, [Argo's novel is] an engrossing, heartbreakingly real novel of the South."