Soldiers of Fortune
by Richard Harding Davis
The novel is the emerging imperial power of America, telling the story of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and one-time mercenary, and Nadezhda Langham, the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist, when they fall into a coup in Olancho, a fictional Latin American republic. When a coup d'état by corrupt politicians and generals threatens the American-owned Valencia Mining Company, Clay organizes his workers and a handful of Americans to visit the mine because of a counter-coup. Written on the eve of the Spanish-American War, Soldiers of Fortune leaves the young American as a flamboyant, hypermasculine hero of a new military and economic empire.
