The Rum Diary

Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent, alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown of San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, is irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman and is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule, and anything (including murder) is permissible.