PAX AMERICANA, Or, Twilight of the Empire of Coca-Cola

Think of Joshua's debut literary novel, PAX AMERICANA, as The Corrections meets the film Traffic: a sprawling, relationship-driven saga that follows three broken Midwesterners from the Asian pop circuit to Syrian battlefields to Congolese mines and back home to a Fourth of July reckoning with ICE agents in Gary, Indiana, tracing American imperialism from its frontiers to the homefront. The novels reads briskly, will appeal to book clubs, and is grounded in humor, story, and character.

In PAX AMERICANA, cancelled, secretly homeless pop star K.T. Shine can barely pay rent or pick up her kid on time, but then a mysterious phone call sends her on a lucrative tour of a war-torn Asian nation that could either revive her career or torch what’s left of her reputation—or cost her life. A U.S. Green Beret in Syria risks his career to vouch for a seductive tribal chief to whom he’s powerfully attracted, even though he’s fought both with and against his unit. And a corporate rising star falls in love with a Congolese NGO director whose crusade to protect his township just might stop her from beating China to a billion-dollar mining contract—unless she betrays him.

The paths of these three compromised souls collide back in their rusting hometown of Gary, Indiana, during an ICE raid gone violently awry, as the tactics of empire come home.