When Peace Corps volunteer Michael Killigan goes missing in West Africa, his father Randall and his best friend Boone Westfall begin separate quests to find him. Randall, a bankruptcy lawyer, is the warlord of his world, a shark in a fishbowl, exercising power with mad, relentless, hilarious glee; Boone, an American innocent abroad, journeys to the African bush, protected by the twin charms of the passport and the almighty dollar. In seeking Michael, both men find much more than they bargain for.

Richard Dooling's first novel was Critical Care. His short fiction has been published by The New Yorker. He is an attorney who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with his wife and three children.

A National Book Award Finalist

When Peace Corps volunteer Michael Killigan goes missing in West Africa, his father Randall and his best friend Boone Westfall begin separate quests to find him. Randall, a bankruptcy lawyer, is the warlord of his world, a shark in a fishbowl, exercising power with mad, relentless, hilarious glee; Boone, an American innocent abroad, journeys to the African bush, protected by the twin charms of the passport and the almighty dollar. In seeking Michael, both men find much more than they bargain for.

Witches and witch-finders, bush devils, shape-shifters, village chiefs and politicians, judges and attorneys, and medicine men from American and African cultures populate this original, ferociously funny novel by a satirist of the first order.

Impressive . . . Sharply satiric.--Gary Krist, The New York Times Book Review

A bravura display of satire . . . Dooling evokes the humane checks and balances of a deep world: the logic, you might say, of its magic.--Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

The book is absolutely astonishing; I am a Richard Dooling fan for life.--Phillip M. Margolin, author of Gone, But Not Forgotten

The author's fizz of comic energy is as wild and scornful as Richard Condon's.--Time

Satiric and sometimes rollickingly funny . . . Dooling's prose jangles and clangs with the inspired lunacy of a pinball machine.--The Washington Post

First and Third Worlds collide in this dark comedy, in which Dooling explores one of their largest common denominators--absurdity . . . Dooling, alternating his narrative between Sierra Leone's turmoil of witchcraft and poisoned politics and Indiana's air-conditioned and stress-managed landscape, reveals their surprising similarities with ease and wit.--The New Yorker

Richard Dooling writes hilariously about an Indianapolis bankruptcy lawyer and knowingly about the African bush . . . White Man's Grave is a satisfying read, a richly detailed story of two cultures.--Miami Herald

A very fine and darkly funny novel . . . Here is a new talent with an accurate eye and a fine sense for the ridiculous.--The Newark Star-Ledger

A satire of greed and cultural arrogance that stirs all of the genre's ingredients into a bubbling cannibal's stew.--New York

When Peace Corps volunteer Michael Killigan goes missing in the African wilds of Sierra Leone, his father and his friend set out to rescue him. Both men assume that American influence extends to the ends of the Earth, but the power they encounter, and the mystery at its core, proves beyond their expectation or control. A National Book Award finalist.

When Peace Corps volunteer Michael Killigan goes missing in West Africa, his father Randall and his best friend Boone Westfall begin separate quests to find him. Randall, a bankruptcy lawyer, is the warlord of his world, a shark in a fishbowl, exercising power with mad, relentless, hilarious glee; Boone, an American innocent abroad, journeys to the African bush, protected by the twin charms of the passport and the almighty dollar. In seeking Michael, both men find much more than they bargain for.