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The Madrinega Missiles: Book I: Infiltration
Madrinega, Central America, 1983: In this thriller of intrigue and guerilla warfare, Leighton, an American agent, poses as a left-wing journalist to infiltrate a guerilla movement fighting to topple Madrinega’s repressive dictator Eduardo Vilar at the height of America’s war against the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua. His Locate and recover four cruise missiles seized by the guerillas in a bloody attack on a military base. Leighton is nearly killed while pursuing a story about the brutal government bombing of a village with no known ties to the guerillas. Antagonizing Vilar’s regime with his news stories, he is soon arrested and tortured by the Secret Police, then released only to be given an Leave the country or be “disappeared.” Zorrita, the guerillas’ charismatic leader, employs psychological warfare by launching the first missile and destroying Vilar’s prize possession without loss of life. When Vilar retaliates with reprisal killings which trigger an uprising, further undermining his position, Washington increases the pressure on Leighton to find the remaining missiles as Zorrita arranges to spirit him away from the clutches of the Secret Police to a remote jungle camp. Sensing he is a friendly journalist able to sway American public opinion, she sets out to educate and seduce him into advocating for the guerillas’ cause, as he contrives to build her trust and learn the missiles’ location. But Leighton’s loyalties are quickly divided as their relationship unexpectedly deepens; Zorrita’s intellect, her force of will and sense of history, as well as her sexual allure, present Leighton with a formidable adversary...and ultimately a choice.
290 pages, Paperback
Published December 12, 2022
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October 6, 2025
The Madrinega Missiles (Books 1 and 2) is set in the fictional Central American republic of Madrinega which has fallen under the rule of US-backed dictator General Vilar. Reminiscent of the support that the Reagan Administration gave to right-wing, anti-communist governments and rebels in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, Vilar has been supplied cruise missiles by the US which he has deployed against defenseless villagers, including the wanton destruction of a rural hospital. Madrinega’s leftist guerrillas are led by a charismatic Latin American intellectual Zorrita, who is every bit the female equivalent of Che Guevara. Employing his signature, unforgettable visual style, Hunter’s provides vivid details of the rebel insurgency as Zorrita’s guerrillas seek to hold and hide the missiles they have seized from a military base.
Hunter’s central character, the indomitable African American spy Jeigh Leighton, is sent to Madrinega as a journalist, with instructions to infiltrate the guerilla movement and recover the stolen missiles. - Leighton soon pens an article that exposes the violent repression and war crimes of Vilar’s regime, triggering a swift response: - he is brutally tortured by Madrinega’s Secret Police, but, on Zorrita’s orders, he is rescued from the capital in a risky venture that threatens to expose Zorrita’s identity, and emerges as a member of the leftist guerrilla forces. The Madrinega Missiles begins as a sort of homage to investigative journalism on the battlefield –a version of the film The Year of Living Dangerously– but then transforms into a tale of a bloody revolution fought in the heat of rural Madrinega, reminiscent of the powerful film Voces Inocentes. Then the narrative wonderfully morphs into an unlikely yet credible love story as Leighton and Zorrita discover their mutual attraction for one another.
The very best spy thrillers center on flawed and complex, multi-layered characters, many of whom have a central moral code that is often at odds with the agendas and prerogatives of their government paymasters. Think of John Le Carre’s Alec Leamas (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) or Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer (The Ipcress Files) or Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne. Leighton’s character is expertly drawn by Hunter as an homage to African American heroes who have fought and given their lives to their country from the American Revolution forward. In the spirit of the heroes of the Civil War, the Harlem Hellfighters in World War I, or the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II, Leighton understands the racist and imperialist foundations of American Empire, but he also believes that he can contribute to the betterment of his society. Leighton is essentially fighting for his own freedom as a man of color in America, and, in this mission set in the fictional Central American republic of Madrinega in the Reagan era and the final years of the Cold War, he finds himself fighting for the right of self-determination for all Black and Brown people against American imperialism.
Zorrita, or “Little Fox,” is every bit Leighton’s equal and is written with loving detail and three-dimensionality. She is as complicated as Leighton, possessing the same moral center, navigating the contradictions of her world, and pledging to make it right or die trying. Zorrita reads as an amalgam of fierce Third World Revolutionary women guerrilla fighters like Filipina revolutionaries Maria Rosa Henson and Nieves Fernandez who defended her homeland from the imperialist Japanese forces or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARQ) Commander Elda Neyis Mosquera also known as “Karina.” With Zorrita, Hunter has tapped into the forgotten histories of women revolutionaries.
True to the politics of the 1980’s and the history of how the Reagan Doctrine turned Central America into a killing field, The Madrinega Missiles is both profoundly cynical and critical yet relentlessly hopeful and optimistic. Therein lies the core beauty of this outstanding epic novel: in the midst of a bloody revolutionary struggle for freedom against totalitarianism and imperialism, Hunter gives us a powerful love story between a revolutionary and the spy and in this improbable love there is hope for an independent nation. In this regard, what Hunter has created is far more akin to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls than it is to any standard spy novel fare. Because of Hunter’s nuanced characters and the sophistication of the plot, The Madrinega Missiles is greater in power and scope and more intensely emotional than any traditional spy thriller. Hunter, who demonstrated a propensity to throw a brick through the plate glass window of the espionage genre in 2004’s Secrets of State, has surpassed himself with The Madrinega Missiles and composed an epic masterwork in two volumes. If you are someone who came of age during the Reagan era and protested America’s secret wars in Central America, The Madrinega Missiles will bring you vivid flashbacks of the era, reminding you of all the horror wrought by American forces in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980’s, as well as the duplicity of the -Iran-Contra scandal. It will also remind you of all the beauty and intensity of your one true love and how, like Jeigh Leighton and Zorrita, you were willing to sacrifice everything just to hold that person in your arms.
The Madrinega Missiles is written with such vivid, accurate, and period-specific detail that you will visualize its battle scenes as well as the love scenes between Leighton and Zorrita. You will swear that you “saw” the Madrinega Missiles, that you “felt” the heat of the jungle, that you “cried” for the innocent and the dead, that your heart raced and you cheered for this improbable relationship as Leighton and Zorrita made desperate love in the cave while Vilar’s soldiers pursued them in the hills. The Madrinega Missiles is a prequel to the explosive Secrets of State (2004) in the Jeigh Leighton spy series, and, just like Secrets of State, this novel is impossible to put down. What Hunter offers here in two volumes is a searing experience in America’s dark and bloody past in Latin America. You are left wanting more from this uniquely gifted writer.
Hunter’s central character, the indomitable African American spy Jeigh Leighton, is sent to Madrinega as a journalist, with instructions to infiltrate the guerilla movement and recover the stolen missiles. - Leighton soon pens an article that exposes the violent repression and war crimes of Vilar’s regime, triggering a swift response: - he is brutally tortured by Madrinega’s Secret Police, but, on Zorrita’s orders, he is rescued from the capital in a risky venture that threatens to expose Zorrita’s identity, and emerges as a member of the leftist guerrilla forces. The Madrinega Missiles begins as a sort of homage to investigative journalism on the battlefield –a version of the film The Year of Living Dangerously– but then transforms into a tale of a bloody revolution fought in the heat of rural Madrinega, reminiscent of the powerful film Voces Inocentes. Then the narrative wonderfully morphs into an unlikely yet credible love story as Leighton and Zorrita discover their mutual attraction for one another.
The very best spy thrillers center on flawed and complex, multi-layered characters, many of whom have a central moral code that is often at odds with the agendas and prerogatives of their government paymasters. Think of John Le Carre’s Alec Leamas (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) or Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer (The Ipcress Files) or Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne. Leighton’s character is expertly drawn by Hunter as an homage to African American heroes who have fought and given their lives to their country from the American Revolution forward. In the spirit of the heroes of the Civil War, the Harlem Hellfighters in World War I, or the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II, Leighton understands the racist and imperialist foundations of American Empire, but he also believes that he can contribute to the betterment of his society. Leighton is essentially fighting for his own freedom as a man of color in America, and, in this mission set in the fictional Central American republic of Madrinega in the Reagan era and the final years of the Cold War, he finds himself fighting for the right of self-determination for all Black and Brown people against American imperialism.
Zorrita, or “Little Fox,” is every bit Leighton’s equal and is written with loving detail and three-dimensionality. She is as complicated as Leighton, possessing the same moral center, navigating the contradictions of her world, and pledging to make it right or die trying. Zorrita reads as an amalgam of fierce Third World Revolutionary women guerrilla fighters like Filipina revolutionaries Maria Rosa Henson and Nieves Fernandez who defended her homeland from the imperialist Japanese forces or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARQ) Commander Elda Neyis Mosquera also known as “Karina.” With Zorrita, Hunter has tapped into the forgotten histories of women revolutionaries.
True to the politics of the 1980’s and the history of how the Reagan Doctrine turned Central America into a killing field, The Madrinega Missiles is both profoundly cynical and critical yet relentlessly hopeful and optimistic. Therein lies the core beauty of this outstanding epic novel: in the midst of a bloody revolutionary struggle for freedom against totalitarianism and imperialism, Hunter gives us a powerful love story between a revolutionary and the spy and in this improbable love there is hope for an independent nation. In this regard, what Hunter has created is far more akin to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls than it is to any standard spy novel fare. Because of Hunter’s nuanced characters and the sophistication of the plot, The Madrinega Missiles is greater in power and scope and more intensely emotional than any traditional spy thriller. Hunter, who demonstrated a propensity to throw a brick through the plate glass window of the espionage genre in 2004’s Secrets of State, has surpassed himself with The Madrinega Missiles and composed an epic masterwork in two volumes. If you are someone who came of age during the Reagan era and protested America’s secret wars in Central America, The Madrinega Missiles will bring you vivid flashbacks of the era, reminding you of all the horror wrought by American forces in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980’s, as well as the duplicity of the -Iran-Contra scandal. It will also remind you of all the beauty and intensity of your one true love and how, like Jeigh Leighton and Zorrita, you were willing to sacrifice everything just to hold that person in your arms.
The Madrinega Missiles is written with such vivid, accurate, and period-specific detail that you will visualize its battle scenes as well as the love scenes between Leighton and Zorrita. You will swear that you “saw” the Madrinega Missiles, that you “felt” the heat of the jungle, that you “cried” for the innocent and the dead, that your heart raced and you cheered for this improbable relationship as Leighton and Zorrita made desperate love in the cave while Vilar’s soldiers pursued them in the hills. The Madrinega Missiles is a prequel to the explosive Secrets of State (2004) in the Jeigh Leighton spy series, and, just like Secrets of State, this novel is impossible to put down. What Hunter offers here in two volumes is a searing experience in America’s dark and bloody past in Latin America. You are left wanting more from this uniquely gifted writer.
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