Roosevelt's Beast

Louis Bayard imagines a darker version of the 1914 journey that took Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit deep into the Brazilian Amazon. The expedition, once a respected scientific mission, has been worn down by starvation and the relapsing fevers of malaria, and its members are pushing further into unmapped forest along the River of Doubt. The story is told as a psychological puzzle, drawing on the same historical suspense that brought Bayard his early readership.

After the father and son are seized by a tribe no outsider has documented, their captors offer a bargain: hunt down a creature that leaves no footprints and that none of the tribe has ever laid eyes on. The two hunters must work out what this creature is, where it came from, and whether they can survive it, while the jungle slowly blurs the line between what they see and what they fear.

The novel leans on old-fashioned horror and on the buried secrets of a family that would rather forget its past. It asks whether the monsters men carry inside them are more dangerous than any beast lurking in the trees.