7. Alex Von Tunzelmann, Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder & the Cold War in the Caribbean (nonfiction)
Tunzelmann, who has previously tackled the end of the British Raj in India with Indian Summer, examines the cold war in America’s backyard through the interactions of six powerful men, namely US presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, as they engaged with Caribbean independence in the persons of Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo and Papa Doc Duvalier. As the Amazon review says: “The superpowers thought they could use Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as puppets, but what neither bargained on was that their puppets would come to life.”