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"West and his women...They would drive a man to drink even if he weren't three million in the hole to a South Florida gangster and an Israeli assassin."This quote sums up the essence of the plot of Jon Sealy's excellent "The Edge of America" (which is the perfect title), but the tone of the novel is more serious and loaded with realism than the quote implies. This is a novel with something to say beyond its own entertainment value. CIA operative Bobby West⁠—a man holding desperately onto his youthful ideals and his long-ago dream of being the man to topple Castro⁠—is C.F.O. of the financially failing Artium Group, a company whose businesses are fronts for the CIA. West, caught up in the unsustainable greed of 1980s America, gets himself involved in a money laundering operation with a big-time Miami gangster—but in West's world, nothing is as it seems.When West's frustrated daughter takes off with the initial $3 mil. of the laundering deal, everything goes wrong. Of course it does: this is crime fiction. What's remarkable about Sealy's storytelling is how all the pieces of the inevitable mistakes fall into place. In this novel, everyone makes mistakes. Repeatedly. And in the background, the nation of America stumbles greedily toward a financial crash and a time when "the world would betray America, just as America betrayed the world." Stylistically and tonally, and because of the fastidious research clearly undertaken, Sealy's writing reminds most of Don Winslow's epic Mexican-American drug saga "Power of the Dog" series that ended with this year's "The Cartel." But Sealy's writing is more literary, with many gorgeous sentences and wise insights grabbing attention. Sealy strikes a nice balance though between literary language and a plot-focused story, the former never obscuring the latter.My favorite element of "The Edge of America" is a Southern-noir-esque subplot involving West's daughter and the young fool from South Carolina she ropes into her scheme as they flee across the States with the money. It hits all those noir beats fans of the genre keep coming back for, such as the hopeless dive bars and gas station tension, but Sealy takes it in new directions as the plotline resolves."The Edge of America" is set in 1984 and that's not an abstract date. It's an Orwellian one, of course, and through the period he explores in his novel Sealy comments in the dark time we find ourselves in in 2019. Consider this paragraph, which illuminates the theme at the heart of the story:"Money was the real drug in the United States of America. The year had opened with predictions of an era of permanent growth. All the leading indexes were on the rise, a businessman was in the White House, and the crises of the 1970s were long forgotten. There was money to be made, and even General Motors had hopes of remaining profitable. On Wall Street, investment bankers had figured out how to bundle and sell mortgage bonds, which opened up a new line of ways for investment bankers to grow fat off the labor of middle America. Gimme gimme was the modus operandi. Economists were preening about growth forever while Chevrolet would soon proclaim itself the heartbeat of America. Strong, healthy, sleek. Beneath this veneer, however, you could see a bubble slowly forming in real estate, a crash was on the horizon.""The Edge of America" is a complex, layered knockout of a literary crime novel that's at once entertaining, educational, and artistic.