The Silver King: A Novel

by David B. Lentz

The Silver King portrays the intrigue within the underground movement of the Contras seeking the first democracy for Nicaragua. This miracle of freedom is shaped by Sheridan Quince, an American pilot and fisherman, who aspires to catch-and-release a world-record tarpon, or silver king, with a fly rod in the Caribbean Sea. After meeting at the Key Largo Bar in San Jose, Costa Rica, Elsa Paraiso leads him underground into the power struggle between the US-backed Contras and Sandinistas, financed by the USSR. The players are Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, Fidel Castro, Oscar Arias, Daniel Ortega and Violeta Chamorro, who seeks election as one of the first women Presidents of a nation in the Western Hemisphere.
The Silver King is a tale of political power plays and high finance among the tropical rainforests, beaches and money centers of Central America. The story traverses San Jose, the Caribbean, Panama and Managua under siege. The Silver King chronicles the genesis of democracy in our time. It is a worthy tale about the value of a free society to a nation of four million people gripped in a desperate struggle to build one.

280 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1999

About the author

Born in Woburn, Massachusetts, David B. Lentz is an alumnus of Bates College as well as the Yale and Wesleyan Writers' Conferences. He is a member of the Center for Fiction in New York, the Royal Society of Literature in London, the Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets, and the Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He has published seven novels: "The Fine Art of Grace", "For the Beauty of the Earth", "AmericA, Inc.", "Bloomsday", "Bourbon Street", "The Day Trader" and "The Silver King." He has written two stage plays, "Bloomsday: A Tragicomedy" and "AmericA, Inc." Lentz published three volumes of poetry in "Old Greenwich Odes", "Sonnets from New England: Love Songs" and "Sonnets on the Common Man" in the latter two of which he introduced new sonnet forms. He created a new model of critical literary theory for reviewing novels in his book, "Novel Criticism." Selected excerpts from his collection of literary works among his novels, stage plays and poetry are available in "Essential Lentz." Three of his novels and one of his stage plays have been read for Pulitzer Prizes in Letters and Drama, respectively, but none has short-listed. Lentz has served Bates College as an Alumnus-in-Admissions (18 years), Stamford-Greenwich Literacy Volunteers of America, Midnight Run for New York City Homeless, Healing the Children Northeast, Inc. (Board), Hurricane Katrina JazzAid: New Orleans, Hope + Heroes Children's Cancer Foundation, St. Baldricks Foundation for Children's Cancer Research and as a Volunteer in St. Paul's Chapel at Ground Zero. Lentz has lived in the Garden District of New Orleans, Boston's Back Bay, Houston, Philadelphia's Main Line and Greenwich, Connecticut.

Reviews

[Steven Arnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lentz holds the reader’s interest with his compelling, based on real life tale centered around the battle between the Contras and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua during the civil that occurred there during the 1980s. The prose is rich and poetic, with different parts of the story tied together with bits of poetry. The Silver King has all the elements one expects and looks forward to in a novel of intrigue and adventure. Stories of the Nicaraguan civil war are much more commonly told from the point of view of the Sandinistas and with sympathy for them—so it was quite interesting for me to read a story that tells the story from the opposite point of view.